Mediatized Dramaturgy: The Evolution of Plays in the Media Age 9781350031159, 9781350031180, 9781350031173

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Mediatized Dramaturgy

Methuen Drama Engage offers original reflections about key practitioners, movements and genres in the fields of modern theatre and performance. Each volume in the series seeks to challenge mainstream critical thought through original and interdisciplinary perspectives on the body of work under examination. By questioning existing critical paradigms, it is hoped that each volume will open up fresh approaches and suggest avenues for further exploration. Series Editors Mark Taylor-Batty University of Leeds, UK Enoch Brater University of Michigan, USA Titles Harold Pinter Edited by Basil Chiasson and Catriona Fallow ISBN 978-1-3501-3362-4 A Companion to British-Jewish Theatre Since the 1950s Edited by Sarah Jane Ablett, Jeanette R. Malkin and Eckart Voigts ISBN 978-1-3501-3596-3 Brecht and Post-1990s British Drama Anja Hartl ISBN 978-1-3501-7278-4 Contemporary Drag Practices and Performers: Drag in a Changing Scene Volume 1 Edited by Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier ISBN 978-1-3500-8294-6 Drag Histories, Herstories and Hairstories: Drag in a Changing Scene Volume 2 Edited by Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier ISBN 978-1-3501-0436-5

Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure Karen Quigley ISBN 978-1-3500-5545-2 Drama and Digital Arts Cultures David Cameron, Michael Anderson and Rebecca Wotzko ISBN 978-1–472-59219–4 Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain: Staging Crisis Vicky Angelaki ISBN 978-1–474-21316–5

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Mediatized Dramaturgy The Evolution of Plays in the Media Age Seda Ilter Series Editors: Mark Taylor-Batty and Enoch Brater

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Seda Ilter, 2021 Seda Ilter has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Louise Dugdale Cover image: © Helen Murray / ArenaPAL All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3115-9 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3117-3 eBook: 978-1-3500-3116-6 Series: Methuen Drama Engage Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Selma and Faruk

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Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Preface

x xi xii

Introduction: Theatre in a mediatized age: A brief overview 1 1 2 3 4 5 6

Theorizing mediatized dramaturgy 13 Plays of discord: Mediatized thematics and traditional dramatic form 39 Dramaturgy of language: Tracing mediatized culture in words 63 ‘Characterizing’ the mediatized subject 101 New designs for the mediatized world: Plot structure 147 Mediaturgical plays: Writing for theatre through media 173

Conclusion: Mediatized dramaturgy and beyond: Texts in progress 193 Notes References Index

199 204 213

Figures 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 & 8 9 &10 11

The Nether Closer Attempts on Her Life Attempts on Her Life This Is How We Die Firefall Love and Information The Yes/No Plays The Yes/No Plays

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91 93 95 98 142 168 181 185

Acknowledgements My thanks begin with those who supported and advised this project in its first version as a doctoral thesis in the Department of Drama and Theatre at Sussex University. I am extremely grateful to my supervisor Professor David Barnett for his impeccable guidance and for shaping my way of thinking in most exciting ways. I would also like to extend my deepest gratitude to Dr Sara Jane Bailes for her intellectual support and scholarly guidance, and for her heartfelt encouragement and friendship. I am so very grateful to Bloomsbury Methuen Drama Series (London) who agreed to give this book a home, and to Mark Dudgeon and Meredith Benson for their kind support. Special thanks to the playwrights and theatre directors who permitted me interviews and provided me with materials: Tim Crouch, David Greig, Douglas Maxwell, Simon Stephens, John Tiffany, Nicola Bramkamp from Das Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. For collegiality and support: Dr Molly Flynn, Dr Louise Owen, Dr Fintan Walsh, Professor Heike Bauer and my inspiring colleagues at Birkbeck College, University of London. For helpful comments and valuable suggestions on this book in its various stages and for her never-ending encouragement, my thanks are due to my wonderful friend and editor, Dr Ruth Charnock. The fruition of this book would not have been possible without the support and inspiration of my friends near and far: Özge Aktaş and Başak Candemir for reminding me not to miss life while being an academic; Seda Bilgi for patiently waiting for me to come home and always being there for me; Kelly Ann Ee for bringing adventure into my life; Aynur Mete for shining a light on my life; Clair Morrow for always empowering me; Chris Odle for being my lighthouse; and my friends – Cate, Em, Hannah, Maddie, Mhairi, Rachel, Syd and Claire – for being my powerhouses and inspiring me everyday to be a better human. My deepest thanks go to my family for their constant support and for patiently bearing my absence. Thank you my parents – Selma and Faruk – for always believing in me and encouraging me to go far away and find my own path even if this meant an everlasting longing; to my sister Bilge for being my rock; to Oscar for bringing joy into our family, and to my dearest Damien Çınar for every smile you have put on my face. Finally, thank you to Adam for bringing more meaning, depth and excitement to my life, and for laughing, thinking and being with me.

Preface What can plays do? In February 2020, I went to the Unicorn Theatre (London) to see Tim Crouch’s I, Cinna (The Poet) – one of Crouch’s I, Shakespeare plays – which tells the story of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with a focus on Cinna the poet, a minor character with only a few lines in Shakespeare’s play. Cinna sits at the heart of Crouch’s play; he is a struggling poet – struggling financially, but also and importantly, struggling to write, to find the words to make sense of and respond to the world outside. The world Cinna lives in is not fifth century BC Rome, but the precarious world of the twenty-first century, identified through projected images of protests, riots and police brutality, through the constant bombardment of information on our mobile phones and breaking news on our screens which may be fake or real. As Cinna explains, language in this world can be dangerous, repressive, manipulative or guilty, hinting at surveillance, censorship and big data services working through social media, scrutinizing our words. In the face of such turmoil, a sense of powerlessness and the complicated ways that language works through us, the writer questions the relationship between the artist and the world. What can art do to generate responsible and effective deeds? Asking ‘[w]hat can words do?’, ‘How can words change things?’, he invites us to take responsibility for our words and write a poem together. As I entered the auditorium, what I saw struck and enthused me not because there was something shocking or extraordinary to be seen. On the contrary, what I saw on stage was rather simple: in front of a massive hanging sheet of crumpled paper sat Crouch at a desk on which there was a notepad, a laptop and a mobile phone (besides a wrapped plastic chicken). This image, which is also on the cover of this book, gathered more meaning as the play began, and Tim and Cinna – two writers, real and fictional – acknowledged their media-saturated lives, how these technologies shaped their environment, consciousness and creative process. Phone notifications, buzzing, pinging, bombardment of information, breaking news on the laptop and the app ‘Freedom’ as an antidote to all define Cinna’s world. Crouch’s act of contextualizing the writer in the info-loaded, globally connected mediatized culture is not merely or simply about bringing Cinna into the contemporary moment. But, I contend, it is also and importantly a symbolic gesture referring to the changing social, cognitive and aesthetic conditions

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of writing, shaping the form and content of the texts produced. The image of the writer – particularly of the playwright – in a mediatized world is an emblematic embodiment of the root of the question I set out to explore in this book: How do playtexts evolve in relation and response to our mediasaturated everyday lives, our mediatized culture and consciousness? Drawing and expanding on this question, I also ask how plays in the mediatized age can crack open our deep-seated perceptions of the world that are profoundly affected by media culture and technologies. How can plays offer a critically engaging, transformative and dissident perspective on the contemporary – the culture of screens, short attention spans, fast-paced lives and the disempowering discourse of populist media and politics? The questions Crouch’s Cinna recurrently asks – What can words do?; How will my words change anything? – echo my questions here about the capacity of language and what it can do in the face of a complex and uncertain world. The play is an invitation to think about the power and role of language, what words can do and undo, and how a writer (the playwright, Cinna, and the audience) can use words responsibly to generate an alternative, unorthodox view of the world we live in. In a similar vein, this book is an invitation to think about how playwrights write today, how the aesthetics and thematics of contemporary dramatic writing have evolved to respond to our mediadriven culture and consciousness, and how plays can create space for dissident thinking about and critical resistance to the given narratives of our late capitalist, mediatized culture.

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Introduction Theatre in a mediatized age: A brief overview

At a talk that theatre-maker and playwright Tim Crouch gave to our postgraduate students at Birkbeck College (University of London, 2017), he pointed out a significant aspect of playwriting when he said that the writing is shaped always in conversation with our environments and the tools we create and use. In an age where media technologies pervade and contour almost every aspect of our lives, dramatic writing is inevitably formed and delivered in relation to this mediatized social, cultural and cognitive ecology. Increasingly since the 1990s, and especially since the digital revolution of the early 2000s, when information and communication technologies became more ubiquitous and accessible than ever before, a growing number of plays written for the stage have tackled the impact of media on society, politics, human relationships and perception. Some of these plays overtly address these themes by directly referring to them in form and/or content such as Patrick Marber’s Closer (1997), Lucy Prebble’s The Sugar Syndrome (2003), Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone (2007), Jennifer Haley’s The Nether (2013), Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe’s I Wish I was Lonely (2013) and the Royal Court Theatre’s Bytes (2013). A prominent example is Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information (2012), which, with its fifty-seven short individual scenes that eschew a linear and coherent storyline, formally and thematically evokes the information bombardment we are exposed to, our fragmented society, fast-paced lives and consumerist attitudes. On the other hand, certain plays respond to media culture implicitly through aesthetic reflection and inquiry, namely, through their dramaturgical structure, without necessarily or straightforwardly referring to new technologies in their content. For instance, through the mode of language and characterization, Simon Stephens’s Pornography (2007), John Jesurun’s Firefall (2009) and Christopher Brett Bailey’s This Is How We Die (2014; THWD) reflect on the changing nature of human relationships and subjectivity in our networked world without directly presenting technologies at the heart of their narratives. Pornography’s unidentified, fragmented mode of characterization not only resists the liberal-humanist concept of character but also speaks to our fragmented, multiple sense

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of subjectivity and media-driven, transitory engagements with others on platforms such as social media. Correspondingly, the stage has become increasingly interested in using emergent technologies in theatre performance and with the ways in which rapidly evolving media technologies impact our everyday lives and society. One of the most intriguing forms to emerge has been the use of simultaneous filming of live performance on stage and its synchronized projection on screens, as seen in the works of the Wooster Group, Katie Mitchell and Robert Lepage. The shaping influence of media technologies on theatre is also in evidence in interactive theatre performances by such companies as Blast Theory, Metis Arts and Coney, and in multimedia pieces by 1927 and Complicité – among others. As audiences, we easily recognize the translation of our everyday technologies onto stage, and we grasp the structures and meanings media technologies have generated when, for example, we are asked to take part in a performance through a handheld computer in Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke (2007) or when we have a multisensory experience through the mix of animation, film, live performance and music in 1927’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (2008). This media-saturated theatrical context has also introduced us to broadcast theatre: the National Theatre has livestreamed productions such as Medea (2014) in cinemas since 2009; Forced Entertainment broadcast some of their works such as Quizoola! (2013) and Speak Bitterness (2014) live on the internet, and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach (2012) and Thomas Ostermeier’s Richard III (2016), among others, have been live-streamed online. These developments, radically and irrevocably changing the landscape of theatre practice and experience, have re-galvanized scholarly debate about the ontology and phenomenology of theatre as well as drawing attention to new categories such as intermedial theatre, digital theatre and multimedia theatre. As I will discuss in Chapter 1, the majority of critical discussion often concentrates on aesthetics and design, directing and spectatorship in performance. 1 One of the common debates, for instance, has been about the question of ‘liveness’,2 namely, how the incorporation of media technologies in performances affects the ontology of theatre; its here-and-nowness, proximity and immediacy. Although these discussions are fundamental and necessary, they often focus on the performance aspect of theatre, on components such as the performer’s body and scenographic elements without essentially reflecting on the playtext, the written component of theatre performance. This gap in the scholarship is particularly interesting when considered in relation to the historically textoriented British theatre tradition in which the practice of writers’ theatre still plays a crucial role.

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There have certainly been attempts to fill this gap. Nevertheless, more often than not, the emerging literature on dramatic writing in relation to technology and media culture has often focused on the thematic content, on whether a play ‘talks about’ the technologies or not, focusing on ‘the development of theme rather than [. . .] the exploration of form’ (Lonergan 2015: 48). For example, Amy Petersen Jensen and Michael Kustow look into the explicit representation of media technologies in the narrative content of plays such as Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996) and Faust Is Dead (1997). Kerstin Schmidt studies American drama, particularly Jean-Claude van Itallie’s plays, and explores how they thematically address the ‘trivializing power of the omnipresent media on contemporary society’s ritualized behaviour patterns, and its unrestrained consumerism’ (2005: 89). A similar desire for direct representation of technologies in theatre is evident in Matt Trueman’s The Guardian piece, ‘What Can Theatre Say about the Internet?’, in which Trueman critiques Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information for not directly representing the internet: ‘despite scenes titled Google and Twitter, the play hardly ever mentioned the web directly – once in terms of dodgy network signals, once when an insomniac logs onto Facebook, and again when a character is sacked by email’ (The Guardian 2013). This kind of focus on the explicit presence and portrayal of technologies in the content of plays and their performances is, to an extent, rooted in naturalism’s desire for reproducing what is found in the physical world directly and with objectivity ‘as it is’. However, the emphasis on the overt thematization of media technologies in plays’ thematic content overlooks the possible, often implicit, ways in which these texts respond to the mediatized culture and consciousness. Drawing on these observations about playtexts within the changing ontology and aesthetics of theatre, Mediatized Dramaturgy explores how dramatic writing has evolved in content and form, and how the emerging shifts speak to our media-saturated society, culture and consciousness. To this end, I will explore components of plays such as characterization, plot and language. In relation to this, I also examine new textual formations such as plays written through social media platforms (i.e. mediaturgical plays, Chapter 6) and explore the aesthetics and critical meanings of such media-based playtexts. By focusing on the dramaturgy of certain playtexts in Anglophone theatre, this study investigates contemporary plays’ aesthetic evolution in an age of theatre marked by mediatization and its possibilities, and in a theatre culture that praises its plays and playwrights. In order to carry out this investigation, I propose a new critical paradigm: ‘mediatized dramaturgy’. It is useful at this point to briefly outline how I use these two key terms – ‘mediatization’ and ‘dramaturgy’ – in the context of this study.

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Mediatized dramaturgy I will discuss the notion of mediatization in more detail in Chapter 1, but here it suffices to briefly introduce the term in order to delineate my concept of mediatized dramaturgy. The idea of mediatization emerged from and is used most often in the fields of sociology and media studies. It refers to the ubiquitous influence of media, in the form of social and cultural institutions and ideological technologies of power, on society and individuals increasingly and most influentially from the late twentieth century onwards. ‘Media’3 here refers to something more than a simple collection of individual mediums or tools. By ‘media’, I mean ‘all institutionalized structures, forms, formats and interfaces for disseminating symbolic content’ (Couldry 2012: viii). Media are ‘characterized by historical, cultural, social, aesthetic and communicative facets’ (Elleström 2010: 5), and they produce, shape and communicate meanings in connection with the sociocultural and political context. This definition of media denotes two important points: (1) media is profoundly intertwined with power relations and (2) media and society (the human) are connected and they co-evolve.4 In relation to the phenomenon of mediatization, ‘media’ does not merely refer to the human-generated tools or technologies that determine our contemporary condition, but that, rather, ‘are our situation’ (Mitchell and Hansen 2010: xxii; emphasis in original). As technologies of meaning, which are increasingly more central to our existence, media shapes and influences our everyday lives, interpersonal relations, subjectivity and consciousness. Hence, when we think about a mediatized culture, we think about the contemporary world in which we are constantly inundated with information, our attention spans are shorter, our spatio-temporal experience has transformed, our interpersonal relationships are demarcated increasingly by social media and our perception of virtual reality and physical reality as distinct states and experiences has radically changed. The second notion, dramaturgy, which is a ‘slippery, elastic and inclusive term’ (Turner and Behrndt 2008: 18), has multiple meanings such as ‘the ceaseless dialogue between people who are working on a play together[,] the thing that connects all the various elements of a play together [, and] the soul, the internal structure, of a production’ (Van Kerkhoven cited in Eckersall 2006: 288). Dramaturgy is not restricted merely to the translation from written text to stage, to the organization of performance in close and direct connection with dramatic composition and the historical, cultural or political context. In contemporary Western theatre, dramaturgy considers performance as a whole and offers a theoretical framework that functions as a conceptual coordinator for a production’s intellectual, critical, structural,

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compositional and contextual codes and coherence. ‘With dramaturgy’, Duška Radosavljević explains, ‘anything goes, so long as the artwork being created – text-based or not – is crafted with rigour, intelligence, intuition and attention to detail’ (2013: 103). These are all valid and effective uses of this wide-ranging term, but this book puts forward a related yet also different use of the notion. Here, I identify and use dramaturgy solely with reference to the fabric of the written text – namely, the organization of character, plot, theme and language, and the critical logic underpinning these elements. Combining the two key terms, I put forward the notion of mediatized dramaturgy in order to refer to and explore new modes of playtext that have evolved in response to a mediatized world rather than to theatrical dramaturgies and to investigate how they incorporate media technologies within performances. Using this notion as the theoretical framework, I look into different elements of the playtext – its thematic content, language, characterization and plot structure. For example, I examine the ways in which language is mediatized through the use of medialect in Closer. Elsewhere, I consider how Attempts on Her Life and Firefall (2006, 2009) use fragmented language to deliver bits of information that fail to form a coherent narrative or dialogue among the characters, and as a result, evoke the sense of social disintegration in a firmly networked culture. Following the analysis of dramaturgical elements in relation to mediatization, as mentioned earlier, I will use the same theoretical framework to explore media-based playtexts, which I call mediaturgical plays. This new category is not necessarily or hugely different from the playtexts as we know them: they still contain the same elements such as plot structure and characterization, yet they are created via media platforms and shaped in relation to the aesthetics and contexts of these media technologies. David Greig’s The Yes/No Plays (2013–14), for instance, is formed via the news and social network site Twitter and structured as short, 140-character dialogues culminating in micro-scenes.

What is a playtext? In this study, playtext (sometimes used interchangeably with ‘play’) refers to dramatic writing, namely, to the playscript written by a playwright for an audience. Dramatic writing ‘is linked to performance, to the action grasped in its tension, to an action performed by actants (acting forces), generally characters’ (Pavis 2016: 55). I will elaborate on certain aspects of contemporary playtexts in relation to dramatic and postdramatic theatre, particularly in terms of no-longer-dramatic theatre texts in Chapter 1. But suffice it to say that the no-longer-dramatic texts under examination herein

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are often the basis or outline for a performance without being the primary element or absolute centre of the performance that the director firmly adheres to and translates to the stage. In addition, a playtext is, more often than not, a published, material text that one can hold in one’s hands. However, as shall be examined in Chapter 6 with reference to mediaturgical plays, this new mode of dramatic writing can sometimes be documented without being published. This is mainly because these playtexts are written entirely or mostly by using the platform and aesthetic design of media technologies such as Twitter, Facebook and weblogs. Therefore, perhaps in line with the visual and transitory qualities of these digital platforms and due to the fact that publishers might not consider these scripts as proper plays in the traditional sense, these texts are not often published. Yet I argue that this does not change their status as plays, for they are written by a playwright for an audience and performance, and they display and exercise elements of dramaturgical design such as characterization, plot structure and so on. These playtexts are a part of current theatre practice and therefore require further critical attention. This categorization and analysis of playtexts exclude some other forms of writing for performance such as ‘theatre texts’, which are ‘braided, knotted, threaded, sewn, patched together, edited, montaged [and] evolve in the process of making performance’ (Furse 2011: 5). Theatre texts are often produced collectively by devised theatre companies, artist groups or theatre-makers. Companies such as Forced Entertainment, the Builders Association and Suspect Culture work collaboratively with texts – found, new, montaged – and other material that often emerges not only prior to but also during rehearsals and performance process. Theatre texts also comprise what I preliminarily call techno-texts which are formed collectively by theatremakers and, sometimes, along with participants via digital platforms such as Blast Theory’s Karen (2015). In Karen, an app-based virtual theatre piece about the big data culture we live in and our indifference to the invasion of privacy, there are layers of text: the framing story written by the artists while building the app; the interactive narrative formed through the responses of the participant-audience; and the personality analysis report produced at the end by the artists’ algorithmic system in response to the participants’ responses. These theatre texts emerge as original textual constituents of mediatized theatre with similarities to playtexts such as character presentation, dramatic dialogue and episodic plot structure.5 The discussion of theatre texts is beyond the focus of this study. Here, I investigate the evolution of playtexts in the Anglophone theatre context, predominantly within the historically text-oriented British theatre tradition since the 1990s. The focus on British theatre mainly originates from the

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question I pose above: In a theatre culture, where the idea and trend for writers’ theatre have flourished and where a theatre event is often considered in connection with a dramatic text, what has happened to the playtext in the current mediatized cultural ecology? It is important to consider not only how plays have evolved but also how or whether they offer innovative aesthetic forms and strategies to grasp and critically engage with the social, political and cognitive environment we live in. Throughout this study, I will enrich my focus on British theatre by studying and referring to North American plays such as John Jesurun’s Firefall, Jeremy Gable’s The 15th Line, and Jennifer Haley’s The Nether. Additionally, I have chosen to consider original6 Englishlanguage playtexts written since the 1990s because it is predominantly since then that the ‘transformation of culture into e-culture, of computers into universal carriers, of media into new media’ (Manovich 2001: 6) has escalated along with the prevalent use of social media, information and geo-location technologies, which has been picked up on the British theatre scene as well as in Irish and North American theatres. This does not mean that theatre in text and performance did not engage with emerging technologies and media culture prior to this moment. Productions by the Wooster Group or some of the plays by Jean-Claude van Itallie since the 1970s, to name a few, engage with media technologies and the cultural shift they had generated. Nevertheless, as I will elaborate in Chapter 1, the extent of media’s influence on society and consciousness has never been as pervasive and rapidly evolving as it has been since the digital revolution of the 1990s–2000s. In addition, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Communist East thereafter, political discourse lost the tension between capitalism and socialism. Instead, finance capitalism, technological advances and globalization have dominated societies. Developments in media, particularly in information and communication technologies, have reinforced the expansion of capitalist economy, values and social relationships on a global scale, challenging traditional concepts of nationhood, subjectivity, social relations and class. This shift became manifest in Anglophone theatre as state-of-the-nation-plays gradually went out of fashion, and new modes of dramaturgical and theatrical expression emerged in response to the virtual erasure of an alternative discourse to discussing capitalism due to the seeming inevitability of its triumph. As I will explore, certain plays have rethought their dramaturgical conception and ideological groundings in relation to this change in sociocultural and political circumstance, and sublimated overt and direct political discussion to a discourse on or critique of mediatized culture. That is, plays have become interested in media technologies and mediatization as a political–critical phenomenon and thus present a new way of discussing the dominant, late

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capitalist order. This critical interest is evident not necessarily in ‘the direct thematization of the political’ (Lehmann [1999] 2006: 178) and of what it means to live in a mediatized culture, but, significantly and primarily, in the dramaturgical structure,7 in ‘the implicit substance and critical value of mode of representation’ (Lehmann [1999] 2006: 178). In other words, the critical potential of plays and theatre lies predominantly in their form. Text and stage have reconfigured form in response to the dominant narratives of late capitalist society, which are profoundly structured and disseminated through media technologies, shaping our perceptions, subjectivity and relationships. Accordingly, I will investigate how certain modes of mediatized dramaturgy offer the possibility for resistant aesthetics and dissident thinking that can challenge these narratives.

From text to stage: Mediatized dramaturgy in action The focus on playtexts does not suggest restoring textual autonomy and primacy – the idea that has traditionally treated the text separately from performance and its elements. Instead, I follow the idea that dramatic writing ‘is always in motion, thinking about and with performance, not in place of performance, and without predetermining performance’ (Worthen 2010: 81). Hence, this book considers playtexts as one of the components and tools of theatre and as incomplete and latent without or outside performance that ‘resurrects it and brings it to completion’ (Badiou 2008: 212). My analysis here always takes in the text–performance relationship and examines how a play, as a form, shapes performance materials and is interpreted on stage in order to appreciate the possibilities that the new dramaturgical modes offer. For instance, when I discuss characterization in texts, this is accompanied by the analysis of character presentation in performance through the performer’s body. Likewise, when I think about plot structure, I am also considering the mechanics and meanings of scenography and spatio-temporal action. For example, in Firefall the use of screens, live filming of stage action, pre-recorded material and rapidly changing images draws on and works in tandem with the text’s plot structure and language. In The Nether, the scenography created through mirrors, projected images and lighting completes the double reality the plot is based on. However, it is important to note here that as mediatization can be implicit in playtexts, it can also be covert in performance. Or, when it is obvious in a playtext, it may not be tangible in a performance. For instance, despite the fact that there are direct references to the internet, television and social media in Churchill’s Love and Information, in James Macdonald’s production at the

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Royal Court Theatre, we do not overtly experience the mediatization of our lives through the materials of performance such as props, but through our aesthetic engagement with the play’s plot structure in short, abrupt scenes that bombard us with information. The performances in question are often the playtexts’ first productions. I am aware that first productions may offer a restricted view because they might easily be raw or naive rather than critical and may take the plays at ‘face value’. Nevertheless, since the engagement with the plays is without prior examples, first productions represent important and fresh perspectives on directorial tendencies in relation to dramaturgical trends. Where access to the first productions is not possible or easy, I have chosen to examine the best-known productions of the playtexts; this allows for the consideration of predominant and popular fashions in dramaturgy of performance as well as of text.

Summary Chapter 1 sets the theoretical background for the discussion of rapidly evolving media–theatre relations and explains the phenomenon and notion of mediatization. Drawing on the given theoretical foundations, I demonstrate some of the context and trends in contemporary Anglophone theatre in relation to mediatized culture, and then inquire about the place of the playtext within current theatre practice, scholarship and culture. After setting the theoretical foundations, Chapter 2 examines the ways in which certain plays engage with mediatization directly in terms of their thematic content and by adhering to the vision and aesthetics of dramatic theatre tradition. In this chapter, I investigate what the critical and formal implications of dramatic mediatized dramaturgy are and to what extent these plays critically map and engage with contemporary mediatized society. To this end, I examine Mark Ravenhill’s Faust Is Dead (1996) and Jennifer Haley’s The Nether (2013), which belong to different periods of our rapidly changing mediatized culture, and discuss how their timely thematic reflections accommodate and respond to the experiential and perceptual conditions of contemporary mediatized culture. Drawing on the argument set in Chapter 2, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 move the analysis of mediatized plays further from thematic content towards the study of the fabric of playtexts by focusing on three dramaturgical components – language, characterization and plot. Chapter 3 focuses on the dramaturgy of language, exploring how the form of language in plays changes in response to

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mediatization. It considers direct and indirect expressions of mediatization through language. The former consists of new modes of linguistic styles, directly originating from specific media (medialect). The latter refers to more implicit manifestations of mediatization in relation to other social processes, which cause the linguistic medium to be an increasingly ideological, fragmented and Anglicized construct. The chapter explores these ideas through Patrick Marber’s Closer (1997), Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (1997) and Christopher Brett Bailey’s THWD (2014). Following the analysis of language, Chapter 4 focuses on the mode of characterization and examines the ways in which character presentation accommodates our changing sense of self and other, our subjectivity and intersubjective relations in a mediatized context. Drawing links specifically with poststructuralist and posthumanist views on subjectivity as well as with debates about the mediatization of the subject and human relationships in the late capitalist era, this chapter explores how playtexts consider mediatized subjectivity and engages with the question of what it means to ‘be’ in contemporary culture. The chapter studies Simon Stephens’s Pornography (2007) and John Jesurun’s Firefall (2009), and the ways in which they destabilize the liberal-humanist view of the human subject and the traditional form of dramatic character in a bid to grasp how new configurations of subjectivity encourage dissident perspectives on our idea and experience of subjectivity, profoundly shaped by media culture. As the last section of the book that focuses on dramaturgical components, Chapter 5 explores the form and workings of the plot structure of playtexts. In this chapter, I further investigate mediatized dramaturgical patterns in plays and discuss whether and how new approaches in plot composition directly or implicitly accommodate media aesthetics and aspects of a mediatized culture. The chapter examines Douglas Maxwell’s Helmet (2002) and its use of a computer game format as the basis for its dramaturgical framework, and the unidentified, fragmented, multi-sketch form of Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information (2012). The analysis of these plays demonstrates the fundamentally different mechanics and critical implications of these forms of mediatized plot composition and shows how the no-longer-dramatic mode of plot composition opens new vistas for critical thinking and engagement with our mediatized existence. This chapter concludes the part of the study focusing on the playtext as a form written solely by playwrights and published in the traditional sense either before or after their stage productions. Chapter 6 offers a different and significant remark on mediatized theatre and plays by exploring the playtexts, which place media technologies and aesthetics at the heart of their formation process and dramaturgical

Introduction

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composition. Here, I draw on Bonnie Marranca’s term ‘mediaturgy’, which suggests a shift from a text-centred performance dramaturgy into a mediainspired composition that embeds media forms in the performance. Extending her focus on performance to the written component of theatre, I propose to identify the playtexts in question as ‘mediaturgical plays’. This subcategory of mediatized plays highlights the central role of media in the formation process, structure and presentation of these plays and, relatedly, distinguishes them from the ones examined in the previous four chapters. The chapter explores the creation, composition and the performance of mediaturgical plays to question how they engage with contemporary culture and consciousness. To this end, the chapter considers David Greig’s Twitter plays The Yes/No Plays, formed via Twitter and edited for live performance, and also refers to Jeremy Gable’s Twitter drama The 15th Line and Chris Goode’s Hippo World Guest Book, which is based on participants’ edited inputs on an online blog for a year. While considering the new category of plays in terms of form, content and authorship, I also examine how these technologically generated playtexts are put on stage. The final chapter demonstrates that the capacity of a playtext’s mediatized dramaturgy to relate and respond to sociocultural and perceptual conditions of the mediatized age varies according to its approach to the mode of representation. In relation to this, I conclude my argument that ‘no-longerdramatic theatre texts’ with mediatized dramaturgical patterns engender and work through resistant aesthetics that subvert the dominating modes of perception, values and behaviours in society and invite the critical questioning of media’s role in these modes. I also highlight how the evolution of playtexts in response to mediatization generates new aesthetic trends inviting critical thinking and demonstrate how these texts challenge the dominant idea that the written component of theatre in an age of audiovisual, digital forms is less relevant or capable of relating to this culture. This chapter also briefly mentions other forms emerging in mediatized theatre practice and concludes that it is crucial to recognize and examine various forms of and approaches to texts with mediatized dramaturgies within and in relation to the Anglophone theatre tradition, which has historically privileged writing.

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1

Theorizing mediatized dramaturgy

We live in a media-saturated culture: we shop online; track our nutrition, movements and sleep with wearable tech; communicate ideas and opinions on global social media networks; consent to our privacy being violated by multinational corporations and political actors, while, at the same time, participating in social activism against dataveillance on media platforms funded or owned by these same corporations. Theorizing this culture, Neil Postman puts forward an important argument: [T]echnological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. [.  .  .] One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. (1992: 18)

Media’s ecology is deeply connected to sociocultural and political ecology: as new technologies emerge and enter our lives, a consequential change occurs in the social, cultural, economic and political spheres of society. As Postman illustrates, fifty years after the invention of the printing press, ‘we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe’ (1992: 18). Likewise, in today’s fast, hyper-connected and digitized world, everything has changed: from our everyday lives and relationships to our sense of reality and self-expression. We now live, as Zygmunt Bauman argues, ‘in the insubstantial, instantaneous time of the software world’ (2012: 118). New realities such as the global capitalist culture industry characterized by data mining and information manipulation prevail. Playtexts, stamped with the structures and circumstances of the culture that they are produced in, have undergone intriguing changes. As with the stage, which is populated by current technologies and aesthetically and conceptually influenced by the changing media ecology, playtexts speak of a world and consciousness shaped by media technologies and the societal, cultural transformation they have engendered. However, when we consider

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the relationship between the theatre and media, we often focus on the audio, visual, tactile and virtual aspects. We think about the use of multiple projections or screens on stage as shrewdly deployed in Tonnelgroep Amsterdam’s Roman Tragedies (2007) and the Builders Association’s Super Vision (2005–6), or the inventive use of sound technology in such works as the Fuel Theatre’s Ring (2015) and Complicité’s The Encounter (2015). Considering the increasing influence and presence of technologies and media culture in theatre, one wonders where playtexts sit. How has dramatic writing evolved, and how does it make meaning in relation to a mediasaturated world and theatre landscape? How do playtexts accommodate, speak to and raise critical awareness about the impact of media on our lives? This chapter provides the theoretical background for the analysis of these questions throughout Mediatized Dramaturgy. To this end, first I define and outline the notion of mediatization – the sociocultural backdrop that generates media-derived structures, language and meaning in contemporary theatre and dramatic writing. Second, I present an overview of how the increasing presence of media technologies in everyday life has affected the theatre scene, and relatedly, how critical interest in this subject, which has often separated media and text, has left the question of dramatic writing under-examined.

Mediatization: Background The technological has always been at the core of the human evolutionary process. Technology and media are not ‘something external and contingent, but rather an essential – indeed, the essential – dimension of the human’ (Hansen 2010: 65; emphasis in original). Media has never been a neutral force: specific technologies have long-shaped social organization, cognitive patterning, and cultural interaction and values. Today, we live in an age and culture where media is increasingly prevalent, affecting aspects of our lives, consciousness, selfhood, social relations and sociopolitical institutions. We have instant access to information via search engines; we record and digitize our memories on Instagram; we follow news and, at least to a certain extent, affect sociopolitical dynamics by releasing news via social networking services such as Twitter. In this sociocultural setting, ‘characterized by diverse, intersecting, and still-evolving forms of multimodal, interactive, networked forms of communication’ (Livingstone 2009b: ix), media is not an accumulation of different technological mediums, separate from cultural and other social institutions; nor is it supplemental to the content it carries and communicates. Instead, media is a cultural technology, a social institution

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and an ideological mechanism that operates in its own right and affects the workings of society, individuals’ lives and consciousness. It is not merely and narrowly a technical body or system, but the perceptual and ontological condition and the sociocultural and epistemological environment we live in. Media technologies do not merely determine our situation, as Friedrich Kittler initially suggested, but rather, as Mark Hansen and William J. T. Mitchell put it, they ‘are our situation’ (Mitchell and Hansen 2010: xxii). The changing social and cognitive landscape since the late twentieth century and predominantly since the early twenty-first century – a process that marks the emergence and widespread use of digital media technologies and platforms such as personal computers, the internet and social media – has led to the search for frameworks through which to understand the contemporary world and the changes media has exerted on society. The concept of mediatization can be usefully applied to the theatre and dramaturgy in order to tackle the question of how contemporary plays have evolved in our media-saturated culture and theatre. Let’s briefly consider the Germanic roots of the term Mediatisierung to clarify its complex meaning in English. The German use of ‘mediatization’ dates back to the nineteenth century when ‘the states of the Holy Roman Empire were “mediatized” by Napoleon [as] Napoleon interposed between the miscellany of independent cities, the princes and the archbishops who previously answered only to the Emperor, an intermediate level of territorial authorities’ (Livingstone 2009a: 6). The term, used in a governmental context, may appear irrelevant to its current use. However, Sonia Livingstone argues that, similar to the way ‘the rule of the annexed state keeps his title’ (Livingstone 2009a: 6), the media ‘not only get between any and all participants in society but also, crucially, annex a sizeable part of their power by mediatizing – subordinating – the previously powerful authorities of government, education, the church, the family’ (Livingstone 2009a: 6). The increasing power of media over other societal and cultural institutions is an important aspect of mediatization. The contemporary use of the term Mediatisierung simply refers to social change in relation to media’s prevalent influence and presence, as well as to the interconnections between media and other social systems and institutions. Some media scholars and sociologists use terms such as ‘medialization’1 and ‘mediazation’2 to denote the influence of media on social and cultural conditions. However, alongside mediatization, ‘mediation’ is the most commonly used notion to characterize media influence in the contemporary world. These two notions can be confused or considered to be the same. Nevertheless, media theorists such as Stig Hjarvard, Sonia Livingstone, Gianpietro Mazzoleni and Winfried Schulz suggest mediatization differs

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from, though overlaps with, the broader concept of mediation. Briefly, mediation refers to ‘any acts of intervening, conveying, or reconciling between different actors, collectives, or institutions’ (Mazzoleni and Schulz 2010: 249). By contrast, mediatization refers to a process whereby media move beyond simply mediating in the sense of ‘getting in between’ (Livingstone 2009b: ix–x); instead, they ‘alter the historical possibilities for human communication by reshaping relations not just among media organizations and their publics but among all social institutions – government, commerce, family, church, and so forth’ (Livingstone 2009b). Mediatization, therefore, implies a social phenomenon exerted on contemporary society and individuals by media. It is also important to touch on the idea of ‘media logic’ at this point since it is fundamental to our understanding of mediatization as a current social, cultural and cognitive experience. David Altheide and Robert Snow’s understanding of media as a social force proposes that media has a unique logic of its own which shapes social life and other social institutions (1979: 9, 12). Media logic, they argue, is ‘a way of “seeing” and of interpreting social affairs’ (1979: 9); it suggests a framework or process through which media presents and shares information and, accordingly, influences the sociocultural organization and perceptual and cognitive patterning. ‘Form’ in Altheide and Snow’s sense, borrowing from Georg Simmel’s definition of form – ‘a process through which reality is rendered intelligible’ (1979: 15) – is not a structure per se, but ‘a processual framework through which social action occurs’ (1979: 15). Media logic, in this regard, comprises a single, coherent framework underpinning all media forms and the social and cultural institutions that are revolutionized through media. In response to Altheide and Snow’s idea, modern sociologists and media theorists such as Knut Lundby, Stig Hjarvard and Friedrich Krotz argue that ‘it is not viable to speak of an overall media logic [and] it is necessary to specify how various media capabilities are applied in various patterns of social interaction’ (Lundby 2009a: 117). Critiquing the idea of a unified, singular mechanism structuring all media, Nick Couldry, among others, argues that the roles the media take on to transform social and cultural spheres are ‘too heterogeneous to be reduced to a single “media logic”’ (2008: 378) and should not be treated ‘as if they all operated in one direction, at the same speed, through a parallel mechanism and according to the same calculus of probability’ (2008: 378). There is no single media logic independent of various cultural and societal contexts and history. For example, if we consider the workings of mass media such as national newspapers or television in Turkey, where there has been an increasing filtering of news due to state censorship, as opposed to how mass media operates in the UK, we would see that the idea of a single stable media logic is unconvincing. Thus, there are diverse instances of media logic at work

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in different societies and times. This, however, does not mean that there is no shared media logic at all. In contemporary late capitalist societies, the current media logic often abides by and works through capitalist ideological discourse and perspective. This common logic is important while considering contemporary plays since it emerges as a significant element in their thematic and aesthetic compositions. For example, in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, we hear the neoliberal voice of advertisements. In Christopher Brett Bailey’s THWD and Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information the aesthetics of speed speak to the fast-paced consumer culture. Building on the origins and some important foundational aspects of mediatization that I introduced here, the following section defines the notion in detail.

Mediatization: Theorizing the contemporary Technogenesis – the idea that human beings co-evolve with the tools and technologies they have created – is a processual story. Media theorists and sociologists such as Friedrich Krotz, John B. Thompson and Stig Hjarvard claim that mediatization points to a ‘long-lasting process, whereby social and cultural institutions and modes of interaction are changed as a consequence of the growth of the media’s influence’ (Hjarvard 2013: 19). Thompson argues that the origins of mediasation (similar to the processes of mediatization) date back to early modernity, to the printing press and the media organizations founded after Gutenberg’s invention in the second half of the fifteenth century (1995: 46). The invention of the printing press rendered it possible to circulate information to society, over long distances and among large numbers of people, as well as institutionalizing mass media as influential forces in society. This technological revolution led to an increase in literacy, undermining the domination of the elite in education, and led to the emergence of a middle class, to the Reformation and the destabilization of political and religious authorities, as well as of the feudal society. This view on mediatization identifies it as a long historical process. Undoubtedly, the human–machine interaction and the societal changes occurring as a result of our technological creations and how we use them have a long history. Besides the example of printing press, we can think of the use of mass communication and information technologies as propaganda machines in Nazi Germany, and how these mass media forms such as film and radio started to be used also for commercial purposes in the post-war era. However, the influence of media on society and consciousness has attained a different degree since the late twentieth century as a result of a drastic

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increase in the media saturation of everyday lives in highly industrialized, late capitalist, mainly Western3 societies. Mediatization as a part of the long history of our interaction with technology refers to this radical shift that has happened more predominantly since the late twentieth century, and to sociocultural transformations that media has generated in contemporary high-modern societies. Although the influence of media has been in play for a long time, the phenomenon of mediatization does not characterize every process through which media affects society and culture. Rather, it suggests a process in high or late modernity in which media has become an autonomous body that majorly influences other social entities such as politics and education. As a result of the independent position and increasingly prevalent presence of media in society, other social, cultural and political institutions have adapted to its logic and workings. For example, we cannot deny that the invention of the printing press transformed individuals’ lives and perception of the universe and profoundly influenced religion and knowledge. Nevertheless, this medium did not revolutionize the form or content of social organizations such as politics, education and the family. Also, the printing press did not operate as an independent medium but was an instrument in the hands of other institutions such as religion, science, politics and commerce, and was used in relation to their ideological logic. It is mainly through the expansion and wide accessibility of media in the twentieth century that it has started to have a major influence on other social institutions, individuals’ everyday lives, knowledge and perception. These are the markers of mediatization and a mediatized society. Yet again, it is important to stress that mediatization does not suggest a single historic event or an entirely new singularity that creates a rupture in our long co-evolutionary process. Rather, it presents an interesting leap in this course. The operations of media as a social institution, with its technological and ideological modus operandi in high-modern societies, are directly and deeply connected to late capitalism and its other processes such as globalization, commercialization, dataveillance and individualization. Mediatization is therefore a metaprocess that contains ‘long-term and culture-crossing changes, processes of processes in a certain sense, which influence the social and cultural development of humankind in the long run’ (Krotz in Hepp 2012: 9). For example, mediatization is associated with globalization in various ways. On the one hand, it means going beyond physical borders between countries, cultures, languages and viewpoints as media technologies extend communication and enable people to connect with others from different places and cultures, and share information in an instant. On the other hand, it operates through the late capitalist logic underlying most

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media structures, and reinforces cultural imperialism on a global scale. The relationship of mediatization to commercialization is evidently based on the fact that mediatization as a social phenomenon and media as its working structures are ideologically loaded and related to the discourses and machinery of late capitalism. In this regard, mediatization, more often than not, supports global emergence and the dissemination of consumer culture through cultural products and commercial images and discourses presented by different media platforms. For example, the language of ‘free service’ or ‘free access’ that big media corporations such as Google and Facebook use is mainly a marketing strategy through which they attain more subscribers and, relatedly, attract more advertising revenue. Moreover, through such strategies, the international media conglomerates acquire access to one of the most important assets today: information. As we agree to the terms and conditions of social media platforms among other media structures, we give away personal information and allow our data to be mined and used. The operation of data mining and dataveillance is one of the fundamental social phenomena that mediatization as a concept encompasses. In relation to this, mediatization also relates to the ‘societies of control’ (Deleuze 1992: 3–7) in which our lives are turned into data to be tracked, regulated and manipulated by governments and corporations. Through its connection with commercialization, mediatization is also linked to the processes of individualization. Our consciousness and experiences are constantly exposed to and synchronized with capitalist ideology as a result of being bombarded by media and cultural industries. We are continually inundated with images, information and self-interest discourse that impose an ideal lifestyle, body, relationship and so on. Media operates through the guise of individual autonomy and self-gain – making us believe that it is our decision to share a selfie or to choose a certain antiageing product. This is surely not a new phenomenon, yet it is increasingly more prevalent than before. T. W. Adorno predicted the deceptive attribute of media technologies in relation to capitalism as he argued that media turned individuals into ‘dupes of mass deception’ (Bernstein 1991: 21), and obstructed the development of autonomous individuals who decide and act consciously for themselves. As a result, today we are encouraged to consent to the machinery of consumerist media which leaves us with a sense of selfhood that we think is autonomous while regulating our decisions, subjectivity and behaviours. Furthermore, as we are more subjected to this illusory state that media subtly inundates our lives with, we find it harder to interrupt it or imagine an alternative to it.4 That said, it would be wrong to consider mediatization merely as a phenomenon denoting ‘change for the worse’ (Livingstone 2009a: 5) as a result

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of its deep connection with the capitalist order. Although the ideological role of the media is fundamental and the advantages of its impact on society are sometimes questionable, media as a cultural technology and social institution also brings about change for the better and has positive effects on society and the individual. Media can serve society as interactive, unifying instruments, rather than as totalitarian or manipulative tools for ideological communication. There is a potential in media for a ‘dialogical, telematics society of image producers and image collectors’ (Flusser 2011: 4), which allows democratic communication among all members of society. Let me give a short example. During the Arab Spring across parts of the Arab world and the Gezi Protests in Turkey, it was mainly through news and social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter that people were able to access information and call for help because mass media agencies were often censored by repressive states. Numerous examples of how social media, particularly Twitter, facilitated communication and access to information during such events can be listed here, and, at the same time, one can question whether media technologies actually enable social mobility, activism and resistance.5 However, mediatization is a social process that accommodates both the liberating and the repressive, manipulative impacts of media on society. Hence, a technophobic viewpoint would be as misleading as a technophilic one when considering the contemporary moment and the meanings mediatization as a social phenomenon contains. Nevertheless, we should remember that mediatization as a metaprocess is always already related to other social phenomena and that we should treat it with these aspects of contemporary culture. In relation to this, despite operating as a social institution in its own right, media is not an entirely independent organism within society. It is in conversation with other societal processes and is subject to political and economic manipulation, ideological discourses and usage, and cultural trends. While identifying mediatization as a concept, I have highlighted that it is a part of technogenesis, our co-evolution with our technologies. Therefore, when we consider mediatization, we defy technological determinism, which considers media as the principal motor of social, cultural, political and economic changes. Although mediatization focuses on how media generates societal and cultural transformations, it acknowledges the fact that media technologies are human-made and their use, content and development are based on our needs and goals. The sociocultural and cognitive changes in our lived experience in these mediatized times have certainly influenced the ways in which we artistically address the changing realities of our world. In theatre, both text and performance engage with new technologies and the conditions of our mediatized existence, consciousness and society. In what follows, I consider

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the mediatization of theatre and the ways in which meaning-making practices, particularly in performance, have been influenced by a mediasaturated environment.

Mediatized theatre: The focus on performance I didn’t think of media as a different thing from theatre. (Elizabeth LeCompte on The Southbank Show, 1987) Theatre has always been in close conversation with emerging technologies, whether this was the lifting machine in ancient Greek theatre (for the deus ex machina), electric lighting technology on the nineteenth-century stage, or the use of film and photography in the twentieth century by such theatre-makers as Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator, who deployed film and photography as critical tools. Therefore, media in theatre, by which I chiefly mean the use of technologies in theatre performance as well as the impact of technologies on theatre language, aesthetics and themes, is certainly not a new phenomenon. However, it is undeniable that the media–theatre relation has intensified since the late twentieth century with the pervasiveness of digital technologies in our everyday lives and culture. Theatre today has become mediatized, responding to our media-saturated sociocultural ecology through the explicit and/or implicit use of technology and media aesthetics not only as a scenographic or narrative element but also as a critical-aesthetic tool. This leap in the continuum of theatre–media relation, which I identify as the mediatization of theatre (or mediatized theatre), has manifested itself in interesting and innovative ways. A pioneer in multimedia theatre, the New York-based Wooster Group has explored and critically engaged with mediatized culture through works that speak to an age ‘where we can talk on the phone, look out the window, watch TV, and be typing a letter at the same time’ (The Wooster Group 1981). The Wooster Group experiments with media forms such as film and television overtly through the content and composition of their work while, at the same time, investigating how media influences our everyday existence, subjectivity and perception of reality as well as our sociocultural patterns. In the 1984 production L.S.D. (. . . Just the High Points . . .) – an appropriation of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible – the group used various media forms. For example, the actor Michael Kirby’s pre-recorded video image was played in the early stages of the production when he was not able to attend the performances, which later became a part of the piece even

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when Kirby was physically present on stage. The actor interacted with his own image throughout the performance, while, at times, other performers recreated behaviour and patterns from videotape. The Wooster Group has always used media as a critical device that questions the historical texts while contemporizing them. Besides using multimedia aesthetics in the composition of their work, the group thematically engages with the impacts of media on society to demonstrate to its audience ‘the voiding of historical and political discourses under mediatization’ (Auslander 1992: 171). The Wooster Group often uses classic texts as found material which they treat as a source and a part of the composition that can be redesigned, deconstructed, fragmented and quoted yet which is never the primary centre of their work. For example, the group did not appropriate Miller’s text in L.S.D. for its narrative content, but for what it culturally symbolized, namely, for its iconic position that suggests a grid of associations. The Wooster Group’s approach to playtexts has often exemplified a postmodern aesthetics of intertextuality, pastiche and self-reflexivity located in a multimedia aesthetic context. In so doing, the Wooster Group destabilizes the source text and its narrative cohesion and redesigns it in a neo-Brechtian manner for a mediatized society. Katie Mitchell, whose experiments with media tend to involve the marriage of live filming with live performance, has been a prominent figure in the UK and continental Europe. Fräulein Julie (2010) – directed by Mitchell for Berlin’s Schaubühne theatre – offers an adaptation and reinterpretation of August Strindberg’s play through a technologically enhanced narrative that shifts the text’s focus from Julie to her maid Kristin. Throughout the performance, the stage accommodated not only the actors but also the filming crew and technicians who constructed the narrative on screen through close-ups and background images simultaneously with the stage action. Mitchell’s use of technology in the composition of this piece serves both as an aesthetic and critical tool through which she asks the audience to question the problematic discourse of the 1888 play, and also proposes an inventive perspective on naturalism in relation to our mediatized perception, namely, on how we see and understand reality through the camera’s eye that saturates our everyday lives in the contemporary. Besides these examples, which epitomize some key aspects of mediatized theatre, there are numerous other theatre-makers whose works incorporate media technologies and aesthetics overtly in their formation and composition process. For example, companies such as Forced Entertainment, Builders’ Association, Robert Lepage/Ex Machina and Imitating the Dog produce multimedia performances using digital and virtual technologies on stage. They sometimes incorporate emerging media as narrative tools to reinforce

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theatrical representation (e.g. Lepage/Ex Machina’s 887), and other times as critical devices to challenge representational structures (e.g. the Wooster Group’s Brace Up!, Nature Theater of Oklohoma’s Rambo Solo). Companies such as Blast Theory (I’d Hide You, 2012) and New Paradise Laboratories (Fatebook, 2009) use interactive and social media to involve audiences as participants and performers to collaboratively explore and question aspects of mediatized culture. The influence of media on theatre manifests itself not only through the direct or explicit use of media technologies on stage, but also, in the absence of hi-tech multimedia which, as Karen Jürs-Munby explains, ‘nevertheless can only be understood by being related to life in a “mediatized” society’ (JürsMunby 2006: 10). Tim Etchells, artistic director of Forced Entertainment, identifies this less-pronounced media influence on stage by explaining that their work is ‘understandable by anybody brought up in a house with the television on’ (Etchells 1999: 95). This is evident in Forced Entertainment’s minimalist, bare stage production Tomorrow’s Parties (2011) in which media is not used as a scenographic and compositional element of the performance, and is not the obvious subject of discussion in the narrative. However, even when media is absent both as a scenographic and thematic tool, mediaderived aesthetics and discourses can shape the dramaturgy and languages of performance. In Tomorrow’s Parties, the fragmented, overlapping utopian and dystopian narratives of the future given through direct and clear language speak to our cognitive processes shaped by our media-saturated, information-bombarded lives and experiences in hypertextual structures and virtual environments. Both media-dominated stages and barer ones illustrate how theatre performance has increasingly become engaged with media not only as technological mediums but also as a sociocultural structure with a burgeoning impact. The mediatization of theatre, whether manifest or not, engages with the contemporary moment differently, depending on a work’s approach to theatrical representation. On the one hand, media can be used as an element of dramaturgical, scenographic and/or narrative design in a way that adheres to and repeats the representational structures of dramatic theatre tradition. Examples of this are abundant – ranging from the 1997 National Theatre production of Patrick Marber’s Closer and Lyceum Theatre-Traverse’s co-production of Enda Walsh’s Chatroom (2005) to Robert Lepage’s 887 (2015) and Headlong and Royal Court co-production of Jennifer Haley’s The Nether (2013). I will return to some of these examples in the coming chapters. It suffices here to briefly illustrate this mode of mediatized theatre with an example focusing on the theatre production of Haley’s play. In The Nether, the mirrored set design on the Royal Court stage with moving screens and

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projections of actor/character’s faces, videos and wireframes creates layers of different realities, namely, the virtual and real worlds where the play takes place. In this production, technologies are used as scenographic and narrative tools to represent and comment on the multiple realities and ethics of the digital network age. Media is both the subject and the central scenographic instrument which figuratively stages the relationship between the virtual and the real onto the stage, translating the dramatic world into the here-and-now of performance. However, dramatic theatre’s traditional use of a linear and conceptually coherent narrative form which depicts the world as a closed-off, unchangeable fictive whole is incompatible with the mediatized coordinates of contemporary society, or as Hans-Thies Lehmann puts it, with the ‘globalized and multiply mediatized [thus,] less “surveyable” and manageable than ever world’ (Jürs-Munby 2006: 11). Using various technologies within the cohesive and unified frame of drama that generates a consistent totality with an identifiable social reality, The Nether speaks more to a world and consciousness based on continuity and unity than the contiguity, inconsistency and fragmentation that define the fast-paced, informationbombarded, globally networked coordinates of late capitalist society, where the boundaries between reality and its representation blur. Nevertheless, this is not to suggest that dramatic mediatized forms do not reflect on our media-saturated cultural ecology. Rather, it is to stress that these modes of theatrical expression, unlike the Wooster Group’s or Forced Entertainment’s critical takes on technology and media age, are limited in terms of their capacity to interrogate and expose the workings of social, cultural and political discourses under mediatization. Instead of challenging, dramatic mediatized forms tend to reproduce the dominant narratives, motives and structures of the late capitalist system. In other words, to use Jacques Rancière’s theory, such works adhere to and repeat the distribution of the sensible – ‘a system of coordinates defining modes of being, doing, making, and communicating that establishes the borders between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the sayable and the unsayable’ (Rancière 2013: 89). By reproducing the sensible, namely, what is deemed natural and reasonable (with no rational alternative)6 by the dominant social order, dramatic mediatized dramaturgies dissolve ‘the bond between perception and action, receiving message and “answerability”’ (Lehmann 2006: 184). In other words, the dramatic theatre model engages with the realities of the contemporary in a more culinary, to use Brecht’s notion, and consumerist rather than critically engaged and dissident manner. In such theatre works, we ‘find ourselves in a spectacle in which we can only look on’ (Lehmann 2006: 184).

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That said, there has been a tendency to use forms and aesthetics of media technologies as scenographic, compositional and/or narrative tools in a subversive manner that reverses and destabilizes representational mechanisms and languages of theatre. For example, the non-linear, multi-layered and multi-perspectival design of L.S.D., generated through technologies and media aesthetics, denies a linear, singular and unified dramatic representation of reality and offers a theatrical language that accommodates and speaks to our mediatized ontology and consciousness. This kind of approach in performance, which aligns with aspects of postdramatic theatre, deploys media as a critical tool that forecloses the voiding of an alternative discourse and perspective on late capitalism and its metaprocesses. It presents a new way of looking at the realities of technologically disseminated, globalized capitalism, a possibility for a dissident thinking that might generate a crack in our established and accepted framework of thought, perception and action in the sensible order. In other words, such theatre works refuse to let us remain contentedly as we are by challenging the sensible and revealing its perceptual and epistemic underpinnings. Rancière calls this act of disruption and exposure ‘dissensus’ – a form of disagreement with the consensus, the given structures and narratives of the dominant social order that excludes differences and possibilities for opposition. The aesthetic resistance to the proliferation of familiar representational structures is, therefore, a political response to the ubiquitous, agreed-upon machineries and discourses of late capitalism. Certain aspects of these mediatized postdramatic compositions, such as intertextuality, discontinuity, subversion, fragmented forms and multiperspectival presentation, resonate with postmodern aesthetics. The postdramatic and postmodern are connected; as Karen Jürs-Munby highlights, postdramatic theatre theory focuses on the application of postmodern and poststructuralist discourses to contemporary theatre (Jürs-Munby 2006: 13–14). Nevertheless, although the concept of postdramatic theatre contains elements of postmodern theory and style, ‘it is not based on the application of a general cultural concept to the specific domain of theatre, but derives and unfolds from within a long-established discourse on theatre aesthetics itself, as a deconstruction of one of its major premises’ (Wessendorf in Jürs-Munby 2006: 14). The postdramatic framework offers a theatre-specific model and ‘a new multiform kind of theatrical discourse’ (Lehmann [1999] 2006: 22) that considers contemporary theatre and performance landscape particularly in relation to ‘the spread and then omnipresence of the media in everyday life’ (Lehmann [1999] 2006: 22). As indicated, this relation to mediatization can be presented overtly in themes and form or implicitly integrated or unconsciously manifested in a performance’s aesthetics. Due to its focus on

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theatre and on theatre’s relation to media culture, ‘the postdramatic’ is more apt a term than ‘the postmodern’. The increasingly salient relationship between media and theatre has galvanized a deal of scholarly and critical attention. More and more undergraduate and postgraduate courses across the UK have started offering modules that explore media–theatre interactions such as digital performance; interactive digital multimedia techniques; performance art, new media and bioart; digital theatre crafts; intermedial performance practice and so on. In addition, academic associations and federations like TaPRA (Theatre and Performance Research Association) and IFTR (International Federation for Theatre Research) have formed working groups such as Performance and New Technologies, Intermediality in Theatre and Performance and Digital Humanities in Theatre Research, all of which tackle the ways in which new media technologies influence theatre practices and research. Undoubtedly, these developments foreground the inevitable impact of new media technologies and mediatization on theatre and call for the recognition and interrogation of this phenomenon in relation to theatre praxis and studies. As Tim Etchells rightly argues, ‘[Y]ou have to think about technology, you have to use it, because in the end it is in your blood. Technology will move in and speak through you, like it or not. Best not to ignore’ (Etchells 1999: 95). Furthermore, these changes highlight an evident tendency in current theatre research towards the performance aspect of theatre in relation to mediatization. Scholarly examinations have generated a variety of discussions about the ontology, phenomenology and sustainability of theatre performance. It is beyond my scope to investigate these discussions in detail, yet it is important to provide a cursory view of some of the central debates in order to substantiate the predominant focus on performance. The prominent debate between Peggy Phelan and Philip Auslander about liveness is based on two different perspectives: while Phelan argues that the incorporation of media-generated images and technologies into theatre threatens the theatre’s ontology as live performance (Phelan 1993: 146), Auslander criticizes the binary opposition between the live and the mediatized and questions whether there ‘really are clear-cut ontological distinctions between live forms and mediatized ones’ (1999: 7). For Auslander, the live is supplanted by the mediatized double, not only physically on stage but also in the individual’s perception (1999: 3–5). This idea resonates with our everyday lives where we engage with virtual environments and, as a result, perceive and conceptualize live experience differently from the here-and-now kind of liveness. Hence, Auslander argues, in theatre ‘the experience of liveness is not limited to specific performer-audience interactions but refers to a sense

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of always being connected to other people, of continuous, technologically mediated temporal co-presence with others known and unknown’ (2012: 6). This sense of liveness also contains ‘connections and interactions between human and non-human agents [which] can produce a feeling of “liveness” and a sense of the machine’s agency and – because it exchanges symbols – even of a subjective encounter with a persona’ (2012: 6). As a result, we could consider that liveness is neither an intrinsic quality of an object nor ‘an effect caused by some aspect of the object such as its medium, ability to respond in real time, or anthropomorphism’ (2012: 9). Rather, in order for liveness to occur there needs to be an inter-responsive, interactive process through which an audience consciously engages with an object and accepts and responds to its claim of liveness. The question of liveness, as briefly evidenced here, focuses majorly on theatre performance, on the composition of bodies in performance whether they are on stage, in the auditorium or across the ocean connected to performance via their screens. Although the performance aspect is understandably the primary topic in relation to theatre ontology, it would also be interesting to explore how changes in perceptions and conceptualizations of live experience, corporeality and real– virtual dimensions influence the textual aspect of theatre – often a part of its ontology. Considering contemporary performance practice, Matthew Causey argues that Phelan’s and Auslander’s arguments about the ontology of performance are ‘unsustainable and even inaccurate because they create binary distinctions among media delivery systems that are challenged in what [he defines as] postdigital condition’ (2016: 428). Postdigital, according to Causey, is not about an endpoint or the obsolescence of digital technologies. On the contrary, it is about recognizing the ingrained presence of these technologies in our lives, defining power relations, systems of control and consciousness. Therefore, Causey argues, the question for artists who are completely entrenched in the aesthetics of the digital ‘resides not in the type or aesthetic use of technology [on stage], but in learning to think like a machine, digitally’ (2016: 440). A postdigital performance that thinks digitally is one that is formed with a consciousness of the digital and engagement with its language and conceptual frameworks in order to resist its ideological machinery and turn ‘the system back against itself ’ from within (2016: 432). Causey’s arguments are inventive and easily relate to an analysis of writing for the stage in mediatized culture.7 Along with liveness, intermediality and digital/postdigital performance have been widely researched topics in the field which comprises such categories as posthumanism and cyborg theatre, virtual theatre and social media theatre. For example, Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (2006)

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and Mapping Intermediality in Performance (2010) tackle the mounting influence of emerging media forms on theatre and how each media technology is remediated in performance, and, as a consequence, shapes aspects of performance ranging from embodiment, spectatorship to temporality and spatiality. Both works tend to explore such interesting constituents and structures of theatre often, if not always, with a focus on live performance. Special issues by The Theater Journal such as ‘Digital Media and Performance’ (2009), ‘Digital “Issues”: Rethinking Media in/and/as Performance’ (2016) and ‘Theatre, the Digital, and the Analysis and Documentation of Performance’ (2016) explore the use of digital technology in performance practice and consider how the use of digital scholarship informs and shapes theatre research. Steve Dixon’s Digital Performance (2007) gives an extensive account of contemporary trends in theatre and performance art in relation to digital technologies. Bree Hadley’s Theatre, Social Media, and Meaning Making (2017) investigates how our social media-saturated lives have shaped theatremaking, spectatorship and theatre industry. Drawing on Patrick Lonergan’s Theatre & Social Media (2016), Hadley furthers the interrogation of social media theatre by analysing performances by Paul Sermon, Blast Theory and Brian Lobel, among others. These accounts importantly map and theorize the current theatre landscape in which media culture and technologies play a significant role. However, at the same time, they epitomize the predominant tendency in theatre scholarship to consider the theatre–media relation in connection with the act and event of performance8 and disclose a certain blind spot: playtexts. Why have playtexts been overlooked? Or, why have texts been less popular than performance while growing number of plays, thematically and aesthetically considering the impacts of media on society and consciousness, have been written for the stage? I will explore these questions shortly. However, before that, it is important to highlight that the text–media relation in theatre has not been entirely ignored; there has been some, albeit limited, research. In what follows, I will briefly investigate some noteworthy aspects of this existing literature. Then, I will look into the central question concerning the overlooked position of playtexts set above.

Playtexts and mediatization: Initial explorations While laying the groundwork for this book, I asked a number of my students, colleagues and theatregoing friends to give me an example of a play that speaks to our media-dominated lives. Answers varied from Patrick Marber’s Closer, Enda Walsh’s Chatroom to Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information and

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Jennifer Haley’s The Nether. These are undoubtedly accurate and relevant, as well as telling of the tendency to consider the relationship between playtexts and media technologies mainly in terms of the direct representation of technology and media culture in the plays’ narrative content. This way of thinking about the dramatic writing-media relation is also in evidence in certain critical texts exploring theatre in relation to media culture and technologies. In her analysis of theatre in a media culture, Amy Petersen Jensen analyses two plays written in the late 1970s and 1980s – A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White by Adrienne Kennedy and Speed the Plow by David Mamet – and considers the direct presence of media forms, television and film, as complementary to the plays’ storyline. Similarly to recent examples such as The Nether, the use of media as thematic content also functions as a critique within the plays of the interconnection between capitalism and media technologies. As Jensen puts, ‘film and television are identified as pervasive entities through which authentic communication is subverted and material capitalism reigns’ (2007: 113). A similar theme-oriented approach is manifest in Kerstin Schmidt’s study of Jean-Claude van Itallie’s plays (2005) and Michael Kustow’s analysis of Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996) and Faust Is Dead (1997) in Theatre@risk (2000). In their analyses of the plays, both critics focus on what the plays are talking about and foreground the shared theme of media’s influence on consumerism. As I identified earlier, the connection between capitalism and media technologies is an important aspect of mediatization as a social phenomenon. Here, one cannot help but wonder how these plays’ forms portray the reality that they thematize and whether any dramaturgical component such as characterization is restructured to speak to the late capitalist, mediatized context. I will explore these questions in Chapter 2, but suffice for now to say that plays that depict our mediatized environment solely in their thematic content tend to adhere to the traditional model of dramatic representation in their composition. They portray the world in a way that reproduces the prevalent images and narratives, which are continually circulated by media in line with dominant power structures. Such dramatic mediatized dramaturgies, which picture our media-saturated lives as a closed-off fictional totality, are in evidence in contemporary Anglophone theatre and are important to consider while investigating the evolution of plays. Accordingly, it is necessary to question to what extent these plays engage with the intricacies of mediatized culture, a culture no longer understandable nor representable through the traditional structures of dramatic theatre. In an age where media pervades our lives and circulates the sensible, the structures through which we artistically signify and engage with the world

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cannot be thought outside of mediatization. In other words, theatre’s mode of representation and perception is directly connected to and influenced by the media-saturated, info-rich, fast-paced world ‘outside’. Therefore, it is important to consider not only and simply what a playtext or theatre performance is speaking about in relation to our mediatized world but also, and more importantly, the ways in which it speaks to the social and perceptual conditions. Rather than mere thematization of our socio-cognitive situations in a mediatized culture, it is through reconsideration and restructuring of sign usage, through ‘the implicit substance and critical value of its mode of representation’ (Lehmann 2006: 178; emphasis in original) that theatre or dramatic writing can critically reflect on experienced reality, and interrupt the prescribed narratives of the dominant social order. The question of form has caught the attention of such scholars as Arnold Aronson and Patrice Pavis who emphasize the importance of exploring the tissue of the text and its new formal languages in order to understand how dramatic writing responds to the media age (Aronson 1999; Pavis 2003). It is important, they argue, to look beyond the representation of new technologies in the content of the written text. Aronson highlights this in his analysis of the works by American playwrights Mac Wellman, Suzan-Lori Parks and Tony Kushner, and Pavis does in his study of French-language plays such as Bernard-Marie Koltès’s Dans la solitude des champs de cotton, Joël Jouanneau’s Allegria (1999) and Eugène Durif ’s Via Negativa (1996). In his discussion of Kushner’s Angels in America, for instance, Aronson arrives at the conclusion that the multi-plot, non-linear and multi-character aesthetics speaks to the multi-layered, hypertextual world of cyberculture and to the contemporary mind that is familiar with and shaped by this culture (Aronson 1999: 196). Drawing on this idea, Mediatized Dramaturgy also scrutinizes plays that deploy media aesthetics and mediatized contexts, implicitly or explicitly, in their dramaturgical architecture as a critical tool, subverting the dramatic paradigm and representational structures, and interrupting the circulation and proliferation of the sensible. As shall be explored shortly, these plays challenge the logocentric, causal logic of dramatic representation, based on an idea of the world as a unified and consistent whole. These texts certainly do something beyond mere thematization and dramatic representation of mediatized existence and consciousness; they not only address and talk about it but also embody the cultural, social and cognitive ecology in interesting ways through their subversive mode of representation. An important aspect that we tend to overlook while analysing the dramaturgical elements of playtexts, as this handful of critical texts show, is that even when there is no direct thematic reference to the media-saturated age or explicit use of media technologies in a play, it can still accommodate

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and critique our mediatized world and perception. There is, for example, a correlation between fragmented, non-linear narrative and our sense of the world, space and time, or between unidentified speakers and our changing sense of subjectivity and identity in an age where we generate identities in the virtual world. Mediatized Dramaturgy considers such implicit manifestations of mediatization and investigates how the fabric of the text speaks to the contemporary without always having to reproduce any technology or mediaspecific setting on their thematic layer. In addition to the organization and thematics of plays, mediatization has also affected the overall genre of playtexts in that playwrights have started experimenting with new media forms and platforms such as Twitter, and presented inventive approaches to playwriting, textual aesthetics and spectatorship. John H. Muse’s ‘140 Characters in Search of a Theater: Twitter Plays’ provides an insightful account of some of the ways in which Twitter has engendered new forms of plays and reshaped both playwriting and the spectatorial experience. We will return to and explore such imaginative formations in Chapter 6 with a focus on mediaturgical plays at the core of whose formation, composition, presentation and reception lie media technologies. Besides being the source and milieu of new kinds of playtexts, social/ digital media has also provided a new environment for the adaptation of classic plays. A well-known example is the RSC’s Twitter adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as Such Tweet Sorrow (2010). The adaptation of old texts into new environments and the convergence of different media and realities – virtual, textual and physical – has generated new research into the use of media-based adaptations of classic works as teaching, learning and research tools. For example, focusing on the implications of social media for Shakespearean research and pedagogy, Stephen O’Neill considers the interactive quality of digital media platforms and highlights their potential as objects of critical analysis and teaching–learning tools through which users can shape the content of the plays and engage with them differently.9 There is a continual and rising interest in this field of mediatized theatre: Robert Allen discusses the process of his adaptation of Strindberg’s A Dream Play as hyperseries broadcast on the internet,10 while Rebecca Wotzko investigates the appropriation of applied drama within the micro-blogging platform Twitter as a means to increase students’ social media literacy and awareness about the reliability of mainstream news media.11 These are important and timely topics that require detailed discussion. In this book, I focus only on original playtexts and not on adaptations because my research question aims to grasp the evolution of contemporary dramatic writing, how its form and content have changed in relation to mediatization, and what the new formations and transformations mean in today’s theatre and culture.

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All these critical discussions provide significant and well-founded perspectives on the evolution of plays in a mediatized culture and theatre stage and show that there is a rising interest in the subject matter. However, it is significantly limited in comparison to our theoretical enquiries about performance genres, performance aesthetics, performance ontology and phenomenology in relation to the media age. It is striking that, despite the rising interest of playwrights in mediatized culture and the increasing engagement of theatre practitioners with media, the question of the playtext as a part of the mediatized theatre landscape has attracted less scholarly attention. But why have playtexts been overlooked in a theatre scene populated by media technologies? Or, why, despite the increasing number of plays written in and about the mediatized times, are playtexts left in the shadow while the performance dimension of theatre has been widely researched?

The question of the text: Dramatic writing for the mediatized age and stage One response to this question could be that media aesthetics and manifestations of mediatization are seemingly less pronounced and perceptible in writing than they are in performance. For example, the binaural head in The Encounter, the cameras and screens in Fräulein Julie and in the Wooster Group’s Hamlet and L.S.D. (. . . Just the High Points . . .) or the earphones in Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree are easily discernible as on stage. However, media in written text, as Patrice Pavis argues, ‘is not, as it is onstage, a foreign body; it actually places itself in an intertextuality in the widest sense of the word’ (2003: 192). In a similar way, the impact of media can be an entrenched, taken-for-granted and even unconscious experience due to the widespread presence of media in society and individual lives. Playwrights writing in a media-saturated world might not be aware of its influence on their perceptual faculties and writing techniques. The impact of the media may be embedded in the flesh and blood of texts, as it were, and so become hardly recognizable. Simon Stephens’s Pornography, for instance, does not necessarily place technology at the heart of the narrative. Apart from a few references to iPhone and computer, there is not a clear reference to media as there is in Haley’s The Nether. Nevertheless, the play’s fragmented composition relates to our cultural consciousness, which is accustomed to brief and fast-moving images and memories, the objectification of the other and social disintegration, all of which are products of mediatization. Hence,

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it would be a mistake to think that, compared to media influence on the performance aspect of theatre, plays are not affected by or unresponsive to changing sociocultural and cognitive conditions. Another reason for the relatively minor interest in the impact of media on plays could be due to the changing status of text in comparison to performance in theatre with the move towards the materiality of performance in European and North American theatre since the 1960s. In Postdramatic Theatre, Hans-Thies Lehmann criticizes the subordination of the staging to the primacy of written drama in dramatic theatre where the playtext is the determining factor even when ‘music and dance [. . .] predominated the “text”’ (2006: 21). The notion of the postdramatic puts forward an idea of theatre that has emancipated itself from the dominance of the dramatic text and from the hierarchy between text and performance, and treats the written component of theatre as just another element in performance dramaturgy and scenography. In questioning the primary position of playtexts in the dramatic theatre tradition, an issue raised earlier by Antonin Artaud among other historical avant-gardists, Lehmann does not propose a textless, antitext or non-text-based theatre. Nonetheless, the idea of postdramatic theatre and its performance-oriented approach have been misunderstood as such. One of the reasons for this misconception is Lehmann’s own deliberate avoidance of the study of postdramatic theatre’s textual dimension or the creative possibilities new writing may offer to the performance process. This is not, however, because the author argues for the exclusion of text from theatre or fails to recognize the evolution of dramatic writing. Rather, Lehmann, albeit briefly, refers to playwrights and the new potential and role of dramatic writing in theatre. He considers Heiner Müller and claims that ‘[i]mportant texts are still being written’ (2006: 17). He also touches on Elfriede Jelinek, Peter Handke, Sarah Kane and René Pollesch, among other playwrights, as illustrating the persistence of playtext and proposes a new role for it in the processes of postdramatic theatre. Considering such instances in Postdramatic Theatre, we can claim that Lehmann reserves the category of postdramatic theatre for the performance dimension of theatre, without denying yet at the same time without scrutinizing ‘the continuing association and exchange between theatre and text’ (2006: 17). The text’s less popular position in the discussions of the theatre–media relation is also based on the conflation between the idea of the dramatic text as primary centre of performance and the dramatic paradigm – the philosophical category of the ‘dramatic’ as a representational design for a unified world. This separation, present in Postdramatic Theatre, relates to the dissolution of the idea of text as the authoritarian element in theatre and to the crisis of representation, deepened by the advent of new audiovisual, digital

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and social media technologies. Within the parameters of mediatized culture, performance is considered a visual form, and the written text is treated ‘as a banal subsidiary of the mise en scène’ (Pavis 2003: 191). Moreover, this conflation positions any playtext within the logocentric predicament of the dramatic that is problematic in relation to the unsurveyable present of the media age. It also leads to a binary view: ‘dramatic’ as text-based and ‘postdramatic’ as non-text-based theatre (Tomlin 2009: 58). Such binary categorization suggests that if the written text has a central role in the performance process, it cannot be considered in relation to postdramatic aesthetics and its transgressive logic that resists and goes beyond drama as ‘the logos of a totality’ (Lehmann 2006: 40). This viewpoint is problematic because it defies the capacity of playtexts to accommodate and critically map our media-saturated lives that are no longer representable through the logic and aesthetics of dramatic theatre tradition. That texts have been overlooked while considering the theatre–media relation does not indicate that plays are obsolete or incapable of capturing the realities of the media age. Without a doubt, as the crisis of representation and the change in the traditional aesthetics of theatre in view of the mediatized world have affected performance, they have also influenced playtexts and led to a re-evaluation of dramatic writing, generating new forms that defy ‘the authority of the dramatic paradigm’ (Lehmann 2006: 27) in response to mediatization. In her analysis of contemporary stage-plays and their dramaturgy, Gerda Poschmann looks into the position, treatment and workings of the text in contemporary theatre and puts forward the notion of the ‘no longer dramatic theatre text’ (in Jürs-Munby 2009: 46). This idea offers an apt category for identifying the transgressive plays that destabilize dramatic logic in a bid to talk about the contemporary world and its realities. In this respect, Poschmann’s concept is central to the discussion of mediatized dramaturgy. Therefore, in what follows, I will delineate this notion and how it challenges and resists the dramatic paradigm.

Textual intervention: ‘No-longer-dramatic’ text Gerda Poschmann coins the term ‘no longer dramatic theatre text’ (JürsMunby 2009: 46) to indicate the shift in the ways playtexts are written and the role of written texts in the theatre. Lehmann reads such plays as a new mode of theatrical sign usage (2006: 17) and a critique of what he considers the potentially untenable role of dramatic representation in the media-saturated, globalized world. The distinction between the ‘no-longer-dramatic’ text and postdramatic theatre is that the latter refers to performance rather than the

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written text per se. In ‘no-longer-dramatic’ plays the ‘“principle of narration and figuration” and the order of a “fable” (story) are disappearing’ (Poschmann in Lehmann 2006: 18); rounded and psychologically motivated characters, dialogue form and linearly structured, recognizable dramatic plot dissolve. These formal features can be easily identified with postmodern aesthetics such as discontinuity, multiplicity and the dissolution of integrated, threedimensional characters. However, the postmodern as a category remains too broad in its parameters to define theatre and dramatic writing, as Lehmann explained as the reasoning for the choice of postdramatic as a performancespecific term. Likewise, the ‘no-longer-dramatic text’ offers a text-oriented viewpoint in theatre studies without ignoring its links to a postmodern form and framework. Besides, these two theatre-centric categories consider the societal and cognitive shifts beyond the postmodern period which largely demarcates changes that took place before the digital age. In this sense, these aesthetic and theoretical categories work in continuity and congruence with postmodernism. These plays still tell stories and relate to the world without reverting back to well-made plays and dramatic unity. They are beyond dramatic representation, which does not mean that they are without representation at all or they do not contain any dramatic elements. Rather, it means that these plays are not shaped according to or governed by the dramatic paradigm or the representative regime – ‘an artistic system of Aristotelian heritage’ (Rancière 2013: xiv) that operates through reproducing and establishing the distribution of the sensible, of what is defined as visible, audible and sayable by the ideological organizational system. Instead, their no-longerdramatic form, which corresponds to Rancière’s aesthetic regime of art, subverts mimetic representation and provokes a shift or an interruption in the distribution of the sensible. It is in this way that these plays bring about an intervention or possibility for politics and dissensus – a possibility to interrupt the representation of the sensible under dominant ideology and reveal the invisible and unsayable that we have become desensitized to under mediatization. Hence, these plays offer textual bases, sources or outlines for performance, which respond to an increasingly ‘less “surveyable” and manageable than ever world’ (Jürs-Munby 2006: 11), a world of screens and mirrors where simulation takes the place of narration. These texts are fundamentally connected to mediatization. That is, the subversive dramaturgy of no-longer-dramatic texts, which destabilizes the dramatic paradigm and, relatedly, the conforming reproduction of the dominant ideology, speaks to a world and consciousness constructed by prevalent technologies and media culture. For example, in Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information, media technologies and the phenomenon

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of mediatization are at the core of its thematic and formal architecture as it talks about our information-bombarded lives through numerous, bitesized scenes. On the other hand, in Churchill’s Heart’s Desire there is hardly any mention or representation of media technologies, but the rewinding and replaying of scenes, which evokes VCR technology, challenges linear plot composition and dramatic unity, while the flow of fragmented utterances speaks to the fast flow of images and information. The plot structure, particularly the reset device, reflects the power that the media exerts on consciousness. In every reset, Churchill erases the preceding scene and replaces it with a new version, which seems to function as a form of censorship as it suggests the dominance of the current scene over the previous and seeks to erase a problematic past in favour of a perpetual present. This could be read as a reference to the media’s shaping of ‘reality’ and individuals’ perception of it, and to how it presents a partial perspective on events in line with the dominant ideology, persuading people to accept prescribed narratives as the truth. The no-longer-dramatic plays problematize the written text’s formerly privileged status over performance, and act as one of the elements in theatre – whether they are a source material, a base or a reference point for the stage action. Importantly, these texts are not written for the stage in the traditional sense; that is, they do not suggest or require a performative translation of the textual material on to stage. Instead, they are written, as Pavis suggests, ‘against the stage [. . .] or, at best, in spite of it: the stage is not there to illustrate and clarify the text, it must provide an apparatus which opens up new perspectives for [and of] the texts’ (2016: 190). Through the subversive aesthetics developed in response to the unsurveyable present, which postdramatic theatre tackles in relation to performance, these texts not only present a textual connection to and reflection on our mediatized world but also offer challenging possibilities for the stage to problematize and disrupt figurative representation. This mode of dramatic writing therefore presents the text as open material for the theatre and deconstructs the traditional harmony and unity between a text and its performance. Instead, it proposes a productive tension between text and performance enabled by the writing’s open and porous form, which invites director, actors and ‘spectators to become active co-writers of the (performance) text’ (Lehmann 2006: 6). Moving beyond and against the erstwhile centrality of dramatic writing, the no-longer-dramatic playtext asks for new directorial, performative and spectatorial approaches, and it ‘suggests itself as a relativized element for performance from the outset and points to its own indeterminacy and status as uninterpreted material’ (Barnett 2008: 16).

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‘No-longer-dramatic’ plays often result in postdramatic performances. However, it is important to note that postdramatic theatre does not completely reject dramatic plays to work exclusively with ‘no longer dramatic texts’. There are postdramatic attempts to reinterpret traditional written drama in a way that strips the dramatic text of its teleological and logocentric narrative and treats it as an element of the performance text with no primacy. The Wooster Group’s 2001 production To You, the Birdie! (Phèdre), which is broadly based on Racine’s Phèdre, and Brace Up! (1991, 2003), based on Chekov’s Three Sisters, provide examples of postdramatic interpretations of dramatic texts. Here, similar to the Wooster Group’s use of a classic text in L.S.D., the plays are treated as found objects and source material for the compositional process through which they are deconstructed, disintegrated, redesigned, quoted and so on. Drawing on the significant gestures in the contemporary theatre landscape which I have delineated in this chapter, Mediatized Dramaturgy explores the ways in which playtexts have evolved in an age of theatre marked by mediatization and its possibilities. Focusing on Anglophone theatre since the 1990s, which still has a strong and evolving culture of dramatic writing, this book considers how playtexts respond to the prevalent influence of media technologies on society, opening up critical spaces for interrupting the sensible and for dissident questioning of the workings of our late capitalist mediatized culture. This study combines theatre theory, sociology and media theory through the concept of mediatized dramaturgy and offers reflections on the ways in which certain modes of playtext negotiate the new reality of the mediatized society through their form, creating a crack in our familiarized frameworks of thought, perception and action that have been shaped by the late capitalist cultural technologies of the media. As mentioned earlier, the analysis of plays is not limited to the texts themselves. Importantly, it refuses the historical dualism of text and stage, of writing and performance. As a result, while investigating the changing structure of plays and their criticalperformative potentials, I will also consider the relationship between text and performance by studying certain stage productions. Chapter 2 explores playtexts that overtly thematize mediatized culture in their narrative context. These plays depict our media-saturated lives and environment in line with the representative regime as a self-contained reality that is organized by causality and linearity. The plays offer intriguing meditations on the different phases of our late capitalist mediatized society, ranging from the early days of the internet in Mark Ravenhill’s Faust Is Dead to the recent context and concerns of our techno-dependent, multi-reality existence in Jennifer Haley’s The Nether. What separates these plays from the others to follow in the chapters that focus on the formal components

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of dramaturgical structure – language, characterization and plot – is the fact that the fabric of these playtexts does not suggest an engagement with the technologies or mediatized contexts that they overtly thematize in their narrative content. In response, the chapter investigates to what extent such plays speak to a world and consciousness dominated by media, when mediatization remains merely on the thematic layer of their composition.

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Plays of discord Mediatized thematics and traditional dramatic form

‘[T]heir kids spent twenty-four-seven on the Net [. . .] they never see their kids anymore,’ foretells the Chorus in Mark Ravenhill’s Faust Is Dead (1997: 121), referring to a community that raises money to prepare their children for the future. This scene foreshadows the world of Jennifer Haley’s The Nether (2014), as the character Sims describes contemporary reality: ‘Eighty per cent of the population work in office realms, children attend school in educational realms – there’s a realm for anything you want to know or do or think you might want to try. [. . .] Real children are hard to come by these days. It’s not like they play outside anymore’ (2014: 17). Written almost two decades apart, both plays comment on our increasingly media-saturated world and how it has altered our lives, illustrating a trend in contemporary theatre. As discussed, since the 1990s the British stage has been populated with plays that address the ubiquitous impact of media technologies on contemporary society. Examples are abundant – ranging from Martin Crimp’s The Treatment (1993), Patrick Marber’s Closer (1997), Lucy Prebble’s The Sugar Syndrome (2003), Enda Walsh’s Chatroom (2005) to Chris Thorpe and Hannah Jane Walker’s I Wish I Was Lonely (2013), Tim Price’s Teh Internet Is Serious Business (2014) and Gary Owen’s Killology (2017). These plays put the mediatized age at the heart of their thematic content and acknowledge the ways in which pervasive technologies shape the social and cognitive coordinates of our current existence. For instance, Chatroom and The Sugar Syndrome tackle internet impersonation and its impact on relationships, while Faust Is Dead and The Nether address hyperreality and the mediatization of perception. The ethics of virtual reality has also been a popular theme in British theatre in the last decade, explored in plays such as Killology, The Nether and Teh Internet Is Serious Business – each offering a different angle – often with an emphasis on the uncertainty of the boundaries between reality and virtual world that lead to harm, offence and the violation of privacy and rights.

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These plays acknowledge the social, cultural and cognitive shifts occurring as a result of our media-saturated environment and bring the mediatized world to our attention, reinforcing theatre’s immediate relation to society. While directly thematizing current technologies and the new realities these technologies have generated, some of these plays, such as Faust Is Dead (Faust) and The Nether, adhere to the aesthetic logic of dramatic theatre, depicting the image-soaked, multi-reality world through the traditional structures of realist dramatic form, and portraying it as a stable, unified totality. The underlying motive for this aesthetic choice is multifaceted. However, one fundamental reason for representing the world as it ‘is’, namely as we perceive it, as profoundly shaped by media, is to make sense of the complex realities and uncertainties of our time via a familiar, easily recognizable form. Hence, the plays follow the deep-seated tradition of dramatic theatre that is based on causal logic, linear structure and meaningful order – a design that depicts our globally networked, pervasively mediatized, fast-paced world as a surveyable whole. This dramatic design begs the question: How and to what extent do dramatic mediatized plays respond to our experienced reality in the contemporary world? Before exploring this question in relation to the thematic and formal designs of Faust and The Nether, it is important to highlight that adherence to the logic and machinery of dramatic representation implicates the reproduction of the culture and structures of the dominant social order and its prevalent perceptual dispositions as communicated and imprinted on us by media. This is basically due to the fact that how we represent the world we live in is directly connected to how we perceive it, which is profoundly influenced by mediatized late capitalist culture, power relations and its technologies. As Hans-Thies Lehmann underlines, the ‘mode of perception in theatre cannot be separated from the existence of theatre in a world of media which massively shapes all perception’ (2006: 185). The technologies and processes of mediatization, and therefore of late capitalism, inscribe the dominant power structures and social order that define Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible. This regulatory system and its machineries support and communicate a particular social reality and standardize what is acceptable, shaping our collective consciousness accordingly in a way that impedes the possibility of dissensus. By dissensus he suggests an individual’s or a group’s subversive intervention into the prevailing organizational system – a system of meanings and values, identifying the perceptual coordinates and boundaries of a society (Rancière 2013). Extending his thoughts on politics to aesthetics, Rancière argues that the representative regime of art replicates the status quo and the hierarchical distribution of the sensible in accordance with which it shapes the society’s perceptual horizons. Considered in line with

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this idea, the dramatic representation of the mediatized world reproduces the prevalent narratives and structures of late capitalism. In relation to this, this adherence to the structures of dramatic tradition, while thematizing the intricacies of the contemporary world, limits plays’ capacity to critically challenge what is deemed sensible or common sense through the deeprooted, widely consented and almost invisible processes of mediatization. In what follows, I explore this point in relation to Faust and The Nether with a focus on the playtexts’ thematic content and dramaturgical design and discuss how they mimic the culture of mediatized late capitalism within their dramaturgy. Following the analysis of each playtext, I briefly investigate some aspects of their first productions and their engagement with the text’s dramatic aesthetics.

Thematization of mediatization Faust: Thematics Ravenhill’s Faust meditates on our media-saturated society and its effects on our existence. The play centres on three characters: Alain, Pete and Donny. Alain is an intellectual, a thinly veiled conflation of Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard, who promotes his new book on the ‘death of man’ and ‘the end of history’ on Letterman as the play opens. Through Alain’s characterization, Ravenhill questions perception and reality in an age where people are inundated with reproduced images gradually transformed into a giant simulacrum without any reference or relation to experienced reality. Pete, on the other hand, is the son of a Bill Gates-like software tycoon who steals his father’s software program ‘Chaos’ with the aim of profiting from it. After being sacked from his teaching job, Alain decides to ‘live a little’ (Ravenhill 1997: 3). He meets Pete, who is running away from his father, and they set out on a road trip across America. There is a continuous Faustian power struggle between Alain and Pete: while Alain-Mephistopheles has experience and knowledge to offer Pete, Pete-Faust is searching for experiences and is willing to do anything to have them. From another perspective, as Caridad Svich argues, both characters function as aspects of Mephistopheles and Faust with ‘the socio-political framework of the text serving as the ultimate comment on the Faustian bargain the world has made for itself in the name of progress’ (Svich 2003: 85). Ravenhill’s use of the Faust myth contributes to and highlights the critique of capitalism in Faust and its manipulative power apparatuses that function under the pretence of progress and civilization.

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The Faustian subtext is reinforced with the introduction of a Gretchen-like character, Donny. Donny is a teenage boy who, due to a traumatic childhood and estrangement from his mother, has been self-harming and sharing his acts of self-punishment on the internet as a way to gain affirmation from others and to feel meaningful. Like Gretchen, Donny refuses to escape from the outcome of his deeds and cuts his throat while broadcasting his act online. Donny’s death, as we shall see, is a planned act that later turns him into sensational TV show material. Ravenhill also incorporates a Chorus that presents a number of parables and commentaries underlining the mediatized context of the play and its critical concerns about human subjectivity and media-constructed reality and consciousness. Ravenhill locates this media-driven fictional world specifically in America. This evidently evokes Baudrillard’s road trip through America, particularly when Alain identifies it as a place ‘within our century’ (Ravenhill 1997: 101). In other words, America as the fictional setting is not simply a physical milieu in Faust but a conceptual framework. This particular context epitomizes the late capitalist age as the final form of social system with no alternative where, according to Alain, we experience the end of reality and progressive history while simultaneously living through the illusion of them in a hyperreal world of simulations. Throughout the play, Ravenhill illustrates the ontology of omnipresent mediatization, rendering the boundaries between reality and its simulation indistinguishable, and demonstrating its connection to neoliberal capitalism. The Chorus speaks to this socio-cognitive context. The first and final Chorus sections picture a dystopian view of the world that is ‘not getting any better. It’s just going on, on and on and on.’ In the face of this reality, the speaker feels estranged: ‘I don’t feel a thing. [. . .] And I wonder what made me that way’ (Ravenhill 1997: 137). This desensitized consciousness manifests in Pete and Donny’s individual attempts to capture reality and feel it. As mentioned, another Chorus part tells a pre-internet story of a church community raising money for their children ‘to be part of the future [. . .] so they can spread the word way into the future’ (Ravenhill 1997: 121). However, the Chorus reveals that, with the arrival of the internet, the children have gradually become addicted to it and spend most of their time in the virtual space (Ravenhill 1997: 121). The picture the Chorus presents here, albeit a rather technophobic and partial one that dominates the entirety of Ravenhill’s play, denotes the pervasive presence of media in our everyday lives and our growing dependency on them. Alain and Pete’s road trip in America sets the narrative backdrop for the representation of mediatized experience and consciousness. Pete and Donny are the epitomes of this state of being and consciousness. Pete, the son of a media mogul, is the embodiment of the kids in the Valley of the Geeks that spend 24/7 on the Net and experience the world through a screen. He

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depends on his camcorder and computer in order to make sense of the world. Mediatized reality, the ‘spectacle’, to use Guy Debord’s term (2010), becomes the prerequisite for Pete to connect with reality and constitute social relations. This is in evidence in the desert scene where Pete treats the camcorder and mediated image as the surrogate of reality that renders this reality ‘safe’: (Looking at the desert at night) Alain  This is a very beautiful place. Pete  I guess it’s okay. I kind of prefer it on the TV. I prefer it with a frame around it, you know? [. . .] when you actually see it, you know . . . it’s a little scary. He takes out the camcorder, looks through it. That’s better. I kind of feel okay now. This always works for me. Some guys it’s Prozac but with me . . . (Ravenhill 1997: 113)

Pete’s immediate reaction to a new, real-life experience is to record it – an action now familiar within contemporary reality. It is not unusual to see people recording the sunset or a political demonstration, posting it on social media, comment on it and so on, while the sunset or the demonstration takes place. Similarly, in another scene, Pete agrees to a sexual encounter with Alain as long as he records it all and they ‘make it like on TV’: Pete  (TV commentary voice) Lost under the stars surrounded by the splendour of nature and the mysterious awesomeness of Death Valley, the kid is initiated into the strange world of the homosexual. (Ravenhill 1997: 114)

It is through the mediated representation that Pete understands and relates to reality. He takes refuge in this alternative framed reality which distances him from the sheer experience as it replaces it. Given that the mediated image offers a sense of reality that is more familiar than the real thing itself, it is not surprising that Pete daydreams about buying and consuming ‘totally real experiences’ in this late capitalist hyperreality: ‘I’m gonna keep the peace in Bosnia. I’m gonna take Saddam Hussein for a pizza. I’m gonna shoot pool with the Pope and have Boris Yeltsin show me his collection of baseball stickers’ (Ravenhill 1997: 112). This is the condition Alain theorizes and tries to communicate on television, namely, a world in which there is an absorption of one state of the real into another, an extensive flow of facsimiles,

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dominating the world and creating a new model of reality, hyperreality, ‘a real retouched in a “hallucinatory resemblance” with itself ’ (Barker 2008: 343). Ironically, it is this distanced and desensitized state, which the Chorus comments on, that Pete experiences and retreats into while, at the same time, he strives to leave by cutting himself: He [Pete] removes his shirt. His chest is covered in cuts. Everything’s a fucking lie, you know? The food, the TV, the music . . . it’s all pretend. And this is the one thing that’s for real. I feel it, it means something. (Ravenhill 1997: 126)

Pete’s act of self-mutilation as a means to feel connected to reality and as a reaction against his estranged relation to the world behind a screen also indicates a search for an autonomous connection to himself and to others. In the search for a real sense of the world and the self, the perception and positing of the body as the truth presents an interesting, yet naive, position. Ravenhill’s idea – stimulation of sensations through the body as a means to feel connected to reality – suggests that the body is outside culture and unaffected by the mediatized, hyperreal sociocultural landscape. Nevertheless, the body evolves within and in relation to cultural and social experiences and ecologies and experiences the same mediated connection to the world. Similarly to Pete, Donny often has a mediated connection with and experience of the outside world. He cuts himself and broadcasts his selfharming performances on the web. Unlike Pete, Donny is critical about his media-driven life and wants to break away from it and have real connections with ‘real’ people beyond the computer screen: ‘Had enough of just communicating with all you guys in a virtual kind of way. Had enough of it all just being pictures’ (Ravenhill 1997: 134). As a last act of his Faustian search for something real, Donny decides to make his actions ‘[t]otally real’ (Ravenhill 1997: 134). He cuts his throat in front of Alain and Pete while broadcasting it publicly on the internet. Interestingly, Donny’s act turns him into a sensationalist reality TV product as it attracts the attention of media conglomerates: ‘every TV show, every talk show. Ricki and Oprah both got the same show: “Death on the Net”. And Stevie already has a song about it. Which he has performed unplugged and is now showing three times an hour on MTV’ (Ravenhill 1997: 134–5). Donny becomes a spectacle himself and then a reproducible version of his own experience and existence, a commodity. Although his suicide supposedly takes him out of the virtual world, his attempt to go ‘live’ on the web ironically draws him back into the vicious circle of simulation. As a result, Donny’s pursuit of real experience ironically culminates in an entanglement in late capitalist hyperreality, which

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Alain sees as a confirmation of his argument that ‘[r]eality finished and simulation began’ (Ravenhill 1997: 132) as the former evaporates into the latter and becomes indistinguishable. Ravenhill reinforces the narrative commentary on the dissolution of reality into media-generated experience and perception through the Chorus’ piece on the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The Chorus here presents ‘excerpts from the “rioting” following the Rodney King trial, which Pete supposedly witnessed and video-recorded’ (Ravenhill 1997: 63). The riots broke out when four Los Angeles Police Department officers were acquitted of all assault charges despite the discovery of a video recording of their violence against Rodney King, an African American from Pasadena. The court’s decision and the video footage increased public sensitivity to the endemic racial inequality and injustice and led to riots. As the video footage of the uprisings was broadcast on television, similar public reactions took place in other US cities. The reference to the riots has a critical position in the play since it comments on the dissolution and simulation of historical facts, namely, how our perceptions and memories of historical events are constructed, shaped and communicated by the media. The Chorus directly draws our attention to how the constant broadcasting of the riots has constructed viewers’ perception of historical reality: ‘It’s happening just like they [the media] said. Whole city is blowing apart’ (Ravenhill 1997: 107). The fact of individuals’ dependence on media images as a gateway to reality is made even more pronounced when the Chorus remarks that people stole VCRs during the chaos rather than food. This critique of our dependency on the image and the spectacle is accentuated when Pete asks Alain: ‘What is the point of food in the house when you have nothing to watch while you’re eating it’ (Ravenhill 1997: 107). The scene shrewdly addresses our dependence on media-generated and framed experiences, historical events and truths as the source and guarantors of reality. This, however, does not deny the fact that King’s bruises and the LA deaths were real events and traumas. Nevertheless, the televised version of historical events that is edited, reconstructed and often embellished becomes the reference point for reality. This, as Ravenhill hints, is the inevitable state of our mediatized existence and perception. However, it does not deterministically suggest that there is no reality outside or without the mediated image, but that the boundaries between reality and its representation have been greatly blurred, and this has irrevocably altered how we perceive and relate to the world.1

Faust: Form Faust’s dramaturgical design frames the complex realities of this world through the unified narrative form of drama which, I argue, remains

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restricted in terms of its capacity to critically engage with the socio-cognitive circumstances and prescribed narratives of mediatized culture. To begin with, it is important to stress that, written in the late 1990s, Faust refers to a world that is different from that of The Nether and ours in the 2010s and 2020s. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, which profoundly shape how we communicate and receive information about the world, did not exist in the late 1990s. Nevertheless, the increasing influence and manipulative power of mass media and information-communication technologies defined the period. Ravenhill depicts some of these conditions such as the changing sense of reality from a singular sense of a physical ‘now’ to a multi-reality platform where reality and its representation are no longer distinguishable. Faust has nineteen chronologically and thematically connected scenes. The Chorus scenes seem to diverge from the linear storyline; however, they provide relevant commentaries that complete the narrative arc. For example, in scene 7 the Chorus refers to the Rodney King riots through a snapshot of a mother and son’s underprivileged living conditions (‘we ain’t got no food in the kitchen’ (Ravenhill 1997: 107)). This sub-narrative clearly resonates with Donny’s story in scene 15 where he reveals more about his poor background: ‘she [his mom] worked nights in the store and so I’d go there after school, hang out with my mom “til like six in the morning”’ (Ravenhill 1997: 129). In addition, the narrative homogeneity is also maintained through scene 8 which starts with Pete repeating the closing line of the Chorus – the son’s words: ‘[w]hat is the point of having food in the house when you have nothing to watch while you’re eating it?’ (Ravenhill 1997: 107). Complementing the unified, causal plot, the time and space are structured, coherent and realistic: the story takes place in present-day America with direct or implied references to real-life people and events such as Madonna, Letterman and the Rodney King riots, and it unfolds through a clear, chronological linearity. Through this dramatic design, rooted in a unity of action along with structured time and space, Faust pictures the world as a cohesive, surveyable whole with clear distinctions, if not binary oppositions, between reality and its mediatized representation. To illustrate, on the thematic level the play remarks on our changing sense of reality through a particular emphasis on the merging of reality and its simulation through, for instance, Pete’s constantly mediated contact with the outside world. This is also evident in the Chorus’s reference to the media’s construction of the Rodney King riots as the basis for historical truth as opposed to the real event itself. However, on the formal level, these instances of mediatized reality, where reality and its representation are no longer distinguishable, are depicted as distinct states of a meaningful, recognizable whole. For example, the scene where Pete meets Donny in an online chat

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room is introduced in the stage directions as a different setting that functions in line with narrative coherence, structured time and unified sense of reality both in the dramatic universe and the outside world: ‘Pete is on the Net, tapping at the keys’ (Ravenhill 1997: 122). The play demarcates the dialogue in the chat room and outside of it by using capital letters without risking the homogeneity of the plot or altering the portrayal of the world as a closed-off totality: Pete  [. . .] Just some fucking actress, Donny, huh? Just some fucking fake. Fuck you. I hate that. That really gets to me. I have to tell him. I’m gonna tell him. Pete types and Donny types his responses. Pete  Donny  (Ravenhill 1997: 125)

Here and throughout Faust, what we see is the representation of mediation or mediated communication. To put it simply, the portrayal of online presence and communication is not necessarily different from the use of media such as newspapers, telephones and television in earlier drama as a part of mimetic representation. The virtual experience in Faust adds to the sense of dramatic unity and one single reality. In addition, the scenes that thematize mediatized reality – Pete’s desire for and dependence on a mediated perception of the outside world and the manipulated reality of the Rodney King events – are pictured from within the fictional universe. The mentioned layers of reality – virtual, framed, copied or represented by media – do not leak into the horizons of the fictional cosmos or risk its homogeneity with multidimensionality and multi-reality. Instead, Faust’s plot structure situates the real and its representation as binaries, as two distinct states and experiences, reinforcing the dramatic vision of the world as a stable whole with a sense of reality distinct from its image, while thematically suggesting that the non-referential hyperreality or multidimensional, mediated perception of reality has radically shifted the perception of physical reality. Ravenhill’s approach to character complements the mode of the plot structure. The main characters – Alain, Pete and Donny – are threedimensional characters whose background, motivations, actions and thoughts are clearly presented. In the play, we learn about the background to Alain’s decision to experience life a little more, Pete’s relationship with his father and the reason for his escape, and Donny’s problematic childhood. Each of these characters is a recognizable representation of an individual ‘who appear[s]

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and behave[s] in a certain way and who carries within him [sic] a certain ethos’ (States 1985: 91). Characterization here is perhaps not as detailed as in the naturalistic dramas of Henrik Ibsen or Anton Chekhov. Nevertheless, the play portrays the human subject as a deep, psychologically motivated, unified individual, as a recognizable person with coherent subjectivity, whose being and consciousness are not altered or multiplied due to her mediated connection to the world and changing sense of reality. For example, Donny’s online and offline identities, and the multiple subjectivities his character contains after being simulated, objectified and circulated by the commercial mass media, are portrayed in line with cohesive dramatic characterization, depicting him as an identifiable character with individuality and autonomy. Additionally, Alain and Donny, who are objectified through Pete’s camera and computer, are consistently pictured as individual characters with depth and unique subjectivity as opposed to being portrayed as hybrid, multi-layered characters with overtly constructed identities. This and other instances in Faust show that Ravenhill’s characters represent the human in a mediasaturated world of changing realities, subjective states and perceptions as a stable, cohesive individual whose subjectivity is yet not radically transformed by the symbolic and informational structures, or at least not yet identified in this drama as such. This representation, through the traditional structures of dramatic theatre, of changing socio-cognitive coordinates and relationships in an increasingly media-saturated culture at the turn of the century offers some significant remarks on the culture and evolution of playtexts in the Anglophone theatre. Thinking in line with the deep-seated realist tendency in British theatre, Ravenhill identifies the representational logic underlying the play with his desire to ‘capture the truth of this new world we live in’ (Ravenhill 2003). In addition, the tradition of dramatic theatre provides a familiar aesthetic language and intelligible frame which offer a meaningful, recognizable order – something we seek in the face of the conditions and experiences of the multiply mediatized world. By making the contemporary comprehensible through a familiar form, Ravenhill aims to make his audience engage easily and directly with the drama and ‘think more critically about The Way We Live Now than they might have done before’ (Ravenhill 2006: 132). Faust achieves this to a certain extent as it acknowledges significant aspects of our mediatized lives, such as the implosion of reality in an increasingly mediadriven environment, and our alternate identities or multiple existences on different media platforms. However, representing the ‘less easily surveyable’ (Lehmann 2006: 11) world as a closed-off, intelligible and, therefore, easily consumable whole limits the critical meanings that the play’s thematics put forward for questioning. The dramatic logic and style, based on representing

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the outside world as we see it, tend to reproduce how we perceive reality, which is shaped by the dominant social order and increasingly more by media’s representations of it. This suggests that Faust’s traditional dramatic design repeats the given perceptual and social codes through a sense of order, unity and consensus that closes the fictional world off to potential challenges to or ruptures in these prescribed structures of the spectacle. This mode of engagement formed through the comfort of accustomed structures suggests what I call awareness with acceptance – a sense of attention to the issues the play foregrounds that authorizes us to become conscious of them without offering the space for challenging and alternative narratives outside the dramatic parameters.

Faust: Performance Premiering at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre in 1997 by the Actors’ Touring Company (ATC) under the direction of Nick Philippou, Faust on stage closely followed Ravenhill’s text in terms of its media-saturated landscape, thematic context and dramatic aesthetics. In order to create the world of Faust and accentuate its narrative plot, ATC fashioned a multimedia environment: Pippa Nissen designed the stage with moveable screens with a monitor at the back wall of the stage and two large screens showing the walls of the play’s hospital and motel settings.2 On to these screens real-time images of the stage action were projected, shot by video-artist Alain Pelletier, who also played Alain, and pre-recorded images from the David Letterman show, the LA riots and Death Valley. The TV screens continuously showed images in relation to the onstage action. For instance, in the scene where the Chorus – presented as a young citizen of Los Angeles at the time of the 1992 riots – recounted his mother telling him off for stealing a VCR instead of food, the TV set at the back of the stage mediated the live action. The onstage Chorus was complemented by the mediated one on TV, a video-chorus of ‘American teenagers [that] keep reminding us of the confusion of the coming generation’ (Hemming 1997: 235). Furthermore, Pete’s dependence on his camcorder and his inability to grasp reality without the mediated image were materialized on the stage, for instance, through pre-recorded footage of the Death Valley desert. The use of technology complemented the play’s realist design and narrative context, portraying a world becoming increasingly dependent on and controlled by media images. The ATC’s intention to translate the playtext into the here-and-now of the stage was evident in each instance of its set design. For example, the juxtaposition of the physical reality of the staged action and its mediated version via live footage made visual the growing presence of

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technologies in our everyday lives and our tendency to experience the world behind screens. Ravenhill’s comment on ATC’s use of technology illustrates the representational and thematic drive of the multimedia design: What I engage with is narrative. But when we all worked together I became excited about the way it [video] could be used more thematically. To what extent are we living in a bubble of images and news? So then the use of video seemed to be integral to the whole theme of the piece. (Ravenhill in Callens 2003: 63)

Without doubt, the multimedia design on stage brought to its audience’s attention media’s increasing presence in our lives and its influence on society, human relationships and perception towards the end of the twentieth century, signalling what is to become a pervasively media-driven culture in the following century. It represented a strong commentary on the sociocultural and cognitive shifts and an invitation to consider our existence and experiences through the context of the dramatic universe – a closed-off, unified whole. However, while the structure of dramatic theatre facilitated an easily identifiable representation of these shifts, it simultaneously reproduced the sociocultural and perceptual motifs that we are repeatedly exposed to and consequently consented to. As a result, the stage production sealed Faust’s world and critical meanings from probing readings in line with the world we live in and how we perceive and represent it in and outside the theatre. As technologies have evolved rapidly in the twenty-first century, new realities and environments have emerged, accompanied by new plays, addressing the continually changing conditions and contexts of our existence and consciousness. Almost two decades after Faust, Haley’s 2013 play The Nether responds to a world in which virtual reality offers a new ‘contextual framework for being’ (Haley 2014: 17) in a similarly direct and representational manner by using the form and conceptual framework of dramatic theatre.

The Nether: Thematics Haley’s play presents a hybrid world where virtual reality has become a state one can choose to migrate to and, relatedly, where ethical questions about our actions have become more confusing than ever due to our multi-reality existence. The Nether focuses on the investigation of the Hideaway – one of the domains in the Nether (that used to be the internet) – by Morris, a Nether detective. Morris seeks to find out about the crimes against children committed in this domain founded and owned by Sims (in-world name)/ Papa (name in the Hideaway). Morris enters the Hideaway undercover as a

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guest called Woodnut in order to find out about Papa/Sim’s and other visitors’ criminal actions against children. As the play progresses, one understands that, in the Hideaway, no one is a child; in this virtual realm, everyone involved has an adult behinder in the real world. Therefore, the children in the virtual world are masked personas of adults: Iris, the girl at the heart of the story, is actually a middle-aged science teacher called Doyle. The play takes place in two worlds as the story moves between the in-world interrogation room and the Hideaway, and the characters take on and perform alternative identities in the virtual realm. This generates an intricate narrative as we find out that Woodnut (female detective Morris) has fallen in love with Iris (a middle-aged man), and Iris/Doyle with Papa/Sims who sees the Hideaway as a useful safety valve that allows people to release their secret desires without infecting their in-world life. The Nether questions the ethical boundaries that attend the rising influence and presence of media technologies. Is an unethical or illegal action committed in a representational world a crime? How does engagement in virtual environments affect people’s actions in real life – are they immoral, criminal acts or preventative opportunities? Is it possible to separate virtual existence, actions and thoughts from those of the real world in an age where virtual reality technologies, social media platforms and info-communication networks shape our relation to and perception of reality? Who are we and how can we take responsibility for our actions when we exist as someone else? Throughout the play, often in the interrogation scenes, Sims and Doyle imply that the real world is a repressive place and there is an urge to escape from the restraints of reality into the emancipating environment of the Nether: Sims [speaking to Morris:] [T]his world, has been so perverted by other people’s ideas of what it should be. You and your speeches on images creating reality and why don’t we make a better reality – look around! Look at this room. Look at what you’ve created. A place to twist people. A place to terrorise them. (Haley 2014: 62)

Visitors to the Hideaway find a refuge from who they are in the physical world and an opportunity to be who they want to be and do what they want to do, as Papa suggests, ‘to live outside of consequence’ (Haley 2014: 21). In the Hideaway, one chooses his/her identity – age, ethnicity, gender – from a set of looks provided. Doyle, a middle-aged teacher, chooses to be the little girl Iris, while Sims, a successful businessman, is Papa, and the female detective Morris is the behinder of the Papa’s new customer-guest, Woodnut.

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The real and the virtual at first seem to be separate. The characters maintain their in-world lives and relationships. However, as the play progresses, the boundaries between in-world presence and virtual existence blur, and this affects their relationships, how they think and act in the physical world. Morris, whose father became a shade in the Nether, implies that his absence affected her as a child. Now, as a detective, she reveals that the people who shift from the real world into the virtual realm and then are taken back again to the physical reality struggle ‘to accept themselves again’ (Haley 2014: 26). The boundaries between reality and representation blur most strikingly in the scene where Woodnut (Morris) repeatedly kills Iris with an axe in the Hideaway: Morris (reading from a report) And in those moments, standing in the carnage of her small body, the hot smell of everything we have inside rising around me, [. . .] I look down to find her body gone. What have I done, have I done something, have I done nothing, is this all nothing, is everything nothing? A giggle at the door, and she reappears, [. . .] she keeps coming, and now it’s not just my hands covered in blood, it’s my face, it’s my body, I can taste it in my mouth, [. . .] I have never felt so much with every nerve, felt so much, felt so much . . . feeling. (Haley 2014: 53)

While the act of killing is virtual and not actual, what Morris as the undercover agent feels is real and actual due to the advanced technology that facilitates the experience of real sensations (Haley 2014: 24). Although the character seems to distinguish the real and the virtual, the boundaries become hard to differentiate: Morris  But if there has been no consequence, there has been no meaning – no meaning between her and myself, between myself and myself – and if there has been meaning, then I am a monster. (Haley 2014: 53)

Haley’s play does not offer answers to the questions about the ethics of virtual reality that it poses, but leaves them open for critical enquiry. Besides this specific thematic focus, the play also addresses the performance and presentation of the self on social media, and the impact of media-saturated lives on human consciousness and relationships. This is a shared thematic preoccupation in both Faust and The Nether. Let’s briefly return to Faust as an earlier example that foreshadows aspects of changing social behaviours and perceptions in the globally networked, digital world of The Nether. As mentioned earlier, in Ravenhill’s play Pete often prefers to relate to others

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behind the screen of his camcorder and computer, and he is comfortable ‘only when [real life] experience can be mediated and consumed’ through technological commodities (Wallace 2005: 272). In Pete, we see a consumer of not only experiences but also relationships. His reluctance to have an emotional connection with Alain, his hasty and distant attitude towards him during an intimate moment, and his desire to experience a direct connection with another human when this relationship is mediated all suggest a change in our interpersonal relationships. Such moments in Faust resonate with the fact that as a result of ‘virtual proximity’ being a defining aspect of human connection incrementally since the beginnings of the internet, the majority of our relationships are based on what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘liquid love’: ‘[c]onnections [that] are too shallow and brief to condense into bonds’ (2003: 62) and ‘easy to enter and to exit’ (2003: xii). Similarly, Doyle’s addiction to the Hideaway illustrates how technology shapes our relationships, and how ironically, as Baudrillard claimed before Bauman, it ‘devours communication and the social’ when we search for connection and intimacy through virtual proximity (1994: 80). Doyle prefers the relationships in the Nether, the ‘beautiful family [and] sympathetic community’ to his in-world ones and is ready to leave his in-world bonds behind in order to cross over (Haley 2014: 21). In relation and addition to this, The Nether comments on the illusion of intimacy when Papa repeatedly reminds Iris that the Hideaway is a business, hinting at the capitalist motives and discourses underlying various social media platforms that offer a sense of proximity and connection. It is also in evidence when it is revealed that once visitors ‘start expressing real emotion, it’s off to boarding school’, namely, that they are expelled from the virtual realm (Haley 2014: 44). This, perhaps in a far-fetched manner, resonates with the fact that today our ‘cyberintimacies slide into cybersolitudes’ (Turkle 2011: xlvii), as we falsely identify our online connections as intimate relationships. This explains Donny’s desire to stop communicating with people online and meet people ‘for real’ in Faust, as well as Morris’s yearning for direct communication and relationship with her father in The Nether. Both plays, however, suggest that in an age where ‘[t]echnology has become the architect of our intimacies’ (Turkle 2011: 590), even our search for intimacy may be interrupted by and culminate in ‘the illusion of companionship’ (Turkle 2011: 590) and the confusion of posts or chats on social media with ‘true’ communication.

The Nether: Form Considering the story and themes of The Nether analysed here, we see that the play directly addresses some of the significant and morally troubling issues in mediatized culture. Its up-to-date and overt thematics, with which anyone

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living in the digital age is familiar, presents us with important questions not only about the ominous potential of the internet but also about the ethics of our decisions, actions, lifestyles and perception in a media-driven culture. However, I contend that the use of traditional dramatic form with its closed structure to portray this multi-reality world puts forward a vision of reality that is no longer in tune with the socio-cognitive circumstances that the play thematizes and therefore limits its critical scope and reception. To elaborate, The Nether is formed of short, linearly structured scenes that follow a coherent, causal storyline, and structured space and time. The two settings in the play – the physical world (the interrogation room) and the virtual world (the Nether/the Hideaway) – are presented with great clarity: there is no confusion as to where the scenes take place and when they unfold within the play’s time schema. Haley introduces the time of the play as ‘soon’ at the opening of the play and makes sure that this vague concept of temporal space is structured within the boundaries of a linear timeline. As the play opens and the plot advances, it becomes clear that this unspecified future is indeed presented through the familiar dramatic order of beginning, middle and end. The final scene, distinguished from the previous numbered scenes and labelled as ‘Epilogue’, is not structured within the linear storyline as it reiterates an earlier scene where Papa brings Iris a birthday cake. In the Epilogue, the major difference is that, this time, the intimate interaction takes place between Iris and Papa’s behinders, namely, between Doyle and Sims. The Epilogue closes as Doyle and Sims express their love for one another without their virtual personas. Although the concluding scene is not given within the chronological framework, it still sits within the narrative frame because it seems to be an imagined dialogue possibly playing in Sims’s mind after learning about Doyle’s suicide. Hence, rather than undermining the linear construction, the final scene complements and reinforces it. The mode of characterization follows the same dramatic framework. Throughout the play, there is a clear distinction between the in-world characters – the behinders – and the virtual ones in the Hideaway. One does not know who is the behinder of whom at the beginning of the play, yet due to the mode of character presentation this becomes clear as the story unfolds. Nevertheless, in this state of initial ignorance, there is no uncertainty about the difference between the real and the virtual or an overlap between these states because the boundaries are evident, stressing the clear binary opposition between reality and its representation. Each character in physical reality and in the Nether is formed and presented as a three-dimensional psychological individual: Sims, for example, is a successful businessman and founder of the Hideaway who firmly believes that he is protecting the in-world children by diverting his paedophilic

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desires to the virtual world. His alternative self or avatar in the Nether is Papa – a fatherly persona who enjoys prepubescent girls and runs a brothellike business where guests are free to experience child rape and murder. The multi-realities and subjectivities, which in the contemporary world of Facebook, Twitter or Instagram are not clearly separable, are represented as connected, yet distinct through apposite use of character names. That is, on the thematic level, the narrative gestures towards the blurring of boundaries between reality and representation; for example, we know that Doyle spends a lot of time in the Hideaway as Iris – to the extent that he wants to migrate to the alternative reality and become a shade. Whereas, on the formal level, the play’s structure delimits the characterization to a unified representation of subjectivity (i.e. we know when the character is Doyle and in the physical world, and when he is Iris and in the Nether), leaving the layered, multiple and hybrid subjectivities outside the realities that the play attempts to thematically address. Ultimately, the insightful thematic engagement with contemporary mediatized culture – something postdramatic theatre tackles in text and performance (e.g. Martin Crimp, Heiner Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, the Wooster Group, Builders’ Association) – is stymied by a dramaturgical structure that portrays the world as a recognizable, unitary whole. Considering the world today, which is identified with economic and political uncertainty, info-rich, fast-paced and always-on culture, globally networked yet socially disintegrated individuals and all-pervasive simulations encouraging the spectacle of consumption, the attempt to represent the contemporary in a teleological, orderly manner is not surprising. However, the desire for logical order and causative structure is no longer adequate to fully articulate and critically grasp the complex social and cognitive conditions of a ubiquitously mediatized culture. This does not mean that plays that talk about mediatized society through traditional dramatic structure do not display interesting and relevant aspects of it. Rather, it suggests that old conventions of representation have become limited and limiting in their ability to speak of and to a world where perception, and therefore representation, is majorly shaped by media technologies and the sociocultural environment they have engendered. This also suggests that as a consequence of its realist, dramatic form, which reiterates the prevailing power structures and what they imprint on our perception as acceptable majorly through media technologies today, the play affirms these social codes and relations. Reproducing the commonly agreed-upon ways of being and thinking through a recognizable frame confines the possibilities for questioning these from within and obtaining subversive perspectives on the world we live in as an alternative to the consensus. Therefore, the direct thematization in The Nether, which

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invites its audience to critically engage with its questions about the world we live in, actually reiterates the familiar perceptual frames and social codes, namely, the sensible of our media-driven everyday reality. Plays that thematically engage with aspects of mediatized culture through the structures and conventions of dramatic theatre doubtlessly bring the themes to our attention. However, this form of engagement is likely to engender consensual awareness as opposed to subversive attention – awareness with acceptance – and keeps us within the perceptual parameters of the prescribed narratives of the dominant social system. The interpretation of The Nether on the Royal Court stage followed the play’s dramatic form and reinforced its meanings and effect.

The Nether: Performance In 2014, Haley’s The Nether received its European premiere in a co-production between the Royal Court Theatre and Headlong, directed by Jeremy Herrin. In a similar way to ATC’s Faust, the stage production of The Nether presented a dramatic interpretation of Haley’s text that depicted the virtual and the real settings as well as the clear shifts from one to another. Following the explicit and implicit cues in the text, Es Devlin designed the in-world interrogation room as a featureless, colourless, high-tech space. There was minimal use of props in this clinical setting – two chairs, a table and projected images on the walls. On the other hand, the Hideaway, as the playtext suggested, was designed to present an environment that was the opposite of the cold, dark in-world space: a dream-like, colourful, Victorian-themed house surrounded by trees and filled with lavish furniture. The set was raised on a suspended platform enclosed by mirrored walls, creating a magical feeling. Although the performance constantly shifted back and forth from the in-world setting to the Nether, the clearly partitioned set presented the two worlds as two distinctly separate spaces and realities within the boundaries of theatrical representation. This was not only because of the manifestly separated sets but also due to the carefully devised actor–character combination that separated the real character from her virtual counterpart. That is, as the performance progressed, the audience figured out that the detective (Amanda Hale) was Woodnut’s behinder in the Hideaway (Ivanno Jeremiah). Likewise, Doyle from the in-world domain (David Beames) transformed into Iris (performed by child actor Zoe Brough). Here, we see the clear separation between real-life self and virtual identity, which preserved a uniform, realistic characterization since each character on page was embodied by a separate actor on stage, despite the fact that the virtual and the real were the same person. This characterization does not correspond

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Figure 1  The Nether. Photo credit: Es Devlin. to the ways in which we experience subjectivity in mediatized culture where our real-life and virtual experiences and beings are intertwined, producing a multiple, heterogonous, divergent ontology. The only actor–character combination that did not change in the real and virtual domains was Sims/Papa who was played by Stanley Townsend. However, the same actor for both in-world and virtual subjects was not necessarily confusing for the audience or a reference to the mediatization of the self because Townsend used different costumes in different realms to distinguish the subjectivities and states. Despite this, some might argue that the use of live actors in the virtual realm created a sense of uncertainty as to the reality of the Hideaway: ‘the live actors of Herrin’s production ensure that the distinction between real and virtual remains blurred [and] that the audience is never quite free of a nagging doubt that the Hideaway is entirely virtual, entirely unreal’ (Stowell-Kaplan 2015: 161). However, questioning its reality is yet another way of thinking about the real and the virtual as binary oppositions, rather than considering the virtual as a new dimension interrelated with the physical reality. Relatedly, the presence of a live actor in the representation of a virtual realm, when the real and the virtual are clearly defined through the set design and characterization, does not necessarily lead to the blurring of the two dimensions. The mode of staging kept these two realities strictly and deliberately within the closedoff universe of The Nether without causing a leak into the here-and-now of the auditorium.

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In addition, it is apt to mention here that, before the performance began, the audience encountered several terminals placed at different parts of the Royal Court through which the audience members could interact with the Nether – an online platform created by Michael Takeo Magruder along with Drew Baker and Erik Fleming. This supplementary design did not only offer an engagement with the world of The Nether beforehand but also rendered the fictional virtual world accessible to and present within the audience’s physical reality. This was an intriguing aspect of the production and one that initially suggested the intermingling and co-presence of different realms – physical reality, fictional/dramatic world and the virtual realm (onstage and in real life). However, later one found out that our input into the virtual world was separated from the world of the play and the outcomes of our interactions were to be displayed in an artwork throughout the building. They were not an interaction with The Nether and the fictional realm within it. In other words, though promising as a design idea, the use of stations only allowed our interactions to be supplementary to the theatre event rather than a aesthetico-critical design letting our reality blur and leak into the worlds of The Nether and its real-life digital extension at the Court. Additionally, casting a trained child actor to perform the virtual character Iris, whose in-world behinder is an adult man, fortified the dramatic framework as she dexterously personified the character and stayed within the boundaries of the dramatic illusion. This was a deliberate choice given the discomforting theme of child abuse. Other theatre pieces such as Milo Rau’s Five Easy Pieces (2016) and Markus Öhrn’s Conte d’amour (2010) deal with the same theme with reference to real events (the cases of paedophile serial killer Marc Dutroux and Josef Fritzl, respectively) yet in ways that radically undermine dramatic representation. While, in Öhrn’s piece, all the adult and children parts are performed by adult actors, in Rau’s production every part is enacted by child actors (apart from Peter Seynaeve, the only adult actor on stage in the interchanging roles of Dutroux and director-facilitator, possibly Rau’s proxy) in a metatheatrical way on stage and by both child and adult actors in the pre-recorded film images. Rau’s piece is especially interesting in relation to Herrin’s The Nether as it casts child actors to talk about a disturbing real-life event yet continually breaks the theatrical illusion by emphasizing the theatreness of the stage action and actorly-ness of the children. On the other hand, The Nether uses a child actor in an entirely fictional setup to enact a virtual false-identity character (a doubly fictional character) who is actually an adult in the play to show the online domain as it appears on the screen to the characters in The Nether. The child actor might offer the possibility of subverting the dramatic illusion momentarily by causing something unquestionably real to break the dramatic illusion and confront the audience.

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Nevertheless, using a trained child actor who would try to stay within the dramatic representation, to represent an online world based on constructed identities, does not aim for and accommodate such subversion. There is a difference between a professionally trained child actor, who is asked to enact a character realistically and who fleetingly breaks the dramatic illusion by accident (where we agree to suspend disbelief and become aware of the nature of live performance), and a professionally trained actor who, as in Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree (2005), is asked to perform the tasks given to her rather than fully embodying them in a realistic style. In the first scenario, the accidental act can surely take the audience out of the play’s world momentarily, yet this is not the critical-aesthetic motive of the overall design that would keep the audience aware of theatre’s ‘theatreness’ all the way through. The realistically conceived characters and their dramatic embodiment by the actors on stage could be challenged in interesting ways. For example, it would be interesting to see Iris being performed by an actor who does not look like the character at all – something Tim Crouch explores in his work, especially in An Oak Tree – in order to destabilize the boundaries of dramatic representation and open the possibility of questioning mediatized being and consciousness in a world of multiple realities. It would also be intriguing to see Iris and Woodnut performed by their behinder-characters/actors, that is, by Doyle (D. Beames) and detective Morris (A. Hale) in order to explore how this approach to staging The Nether would subvert unified and teleological representation, breaking away from traditional aesthetics to relate to our multi-reality, multi-consciousness world. The production of The Nether undoubtedly portrayed our mediasaturated lives through a dexterously choreographed setting and vividly represented story and characters. However, the easily identifiable dramatic frame, presenting the world as a surveyable whole, homogenized the intricacies of the ontology and phenomenology of mediatized society. Furthermore, rather than creating ruptures in the agreed-upon and often media-induced structures of the distribution of the sensible, which divorces those who can take part and be visible, audible and representable from those who are excepted, the dramatic aesthetics reproduced these structures and social codes. As a result, the dramatic dramaturgy (the dramaturgy of dramatic theatre) comforted rather than encouraging the audience to grasp and critically question the socio-cognitive experiences of the contemporary. It represents theatre for consumption (culinary theatre) – a form of theatre that reiterates the dominant power structures the media circulates, and relatedly, keeps its audience within the familiar social codes and narratives, leaving the dissident questioning of the world we live in outside the dramatic cosmos.

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Conclusion: The problematics of dramatic mediatized dramaturgy Faust and The Nether illustrate a common occurrence in contemporary Anglophone theatre practice, particularly in Britain: plays that talk about mediatized culture through the traditional structures of dramatic theatre – recognizable, linear plotline, structured time, unified space and psychologically motivated characterization. One may argue, as Sarah BayCheng does, that ‘dramatic structures and models of theatricality that are more akin to late-nineteenth-century realism [. . .] offer new possibilities for dramatic theatre in an era of new media’ (2015: 689), and ‘theatrical realism suggests an aesthetic distance that allows us to consider violent actions with a critical distance’ (2015: 693). The majority of performances that tackle technology and digital culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries use a non-narrative, non-realistic, postdramatic aesthetics. This may suggest that a return to realist theatre aesthetics nostalgically brings back the old forms, and that the use of the old forms, while addressing the new socio-cognitive contexts, generates an aesthetic and critical distance (2015: 698). However, as I underlined earlier, realist aesthetics are not passé in the majority of Anglophone theatre. Moreover, although in theatre performance the aesthetics of the modernist avant-garde has been popular while addressing the techno-culture and its media forms, in dramatic writing, particularly in the British theatre, the dominant mode has still been the realist, dramatic tradition. Hence, rather than offering a distancing effect, dramatic realism actually limits the critical capacity to engage with mediatized culture in which the lived experience and perception of social reality and thus its presentation fundamentally differ from the understanding of the world in the nineteenth century, based on logical order of cause and effect, and the models that Henrik Ibsen, Chekov or Stanislavski used. In addition, filtering the contemporary through the sieve of dramatic logic and aesthetics suggests the representation of mediatized human existence, consciousness and relations in the way that media shapes them in line with the dominant social order. Dramatic mediatized dramaturgy therefore tends to reiterate what we conventionally accept as the social reality, without necessarily allowing a space for alternative ways of thinking about our times and existence. Therefore, a politics of content placed within the dramatic mediatized textual architecture does not necessarily bring about critical efficacy or engage us intellectually and emotionally. This calls for attention to new trends in the dramaturgy of texts that resist and rupture familiarized representational aesthetics in order to offer

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possibilities for dissident thinking about the mediatized now. Resistance to representation is a political act especially in an age where our lives are inundated with media images. Such resistance, in other words, proposes a challenge to the reproduction of the sensible, and aims at a nonconformist and transformative perception of our existence through a transgressive approach to conventionally mimetic representation, to ‘the perfection of reproduction’ as a projection of an absolute perception of reality (Lehmann 2006: 116). Therefore, plays with such innovative form and critical value engage with the mediatized state of mind from within, and open spaces for alternative perspectives on and narratives about the world we live in. Drawing on these reflections, the following chapters explore the ways in which some contemporary playtexts reconfigure their dramaturgical structure to map, relate and respond to mediatized society and its sociocognitive repercussions. To this end, in these chapters I expand the critical scope from the thematization of mediatization to developments in textual dramaturgy by considering language, characterization, plot structure and media-based plays.

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Dramaturgy of language Tracing mediatized culture in words

If the bard were alive today, he’d probably write, ‘2B or not 2B’. (Thurlow 2007: 221) When Patrick Marber’s Closer opened at the National Theatre in 1997, British theatre encountered one of the first representations of online communication on stage, with a scene set in a chat room. This scene also marked one of the first uses of netspeak through abbreviations (‘Nice 2 Meet U’) (Marber 1999: 23), expressive styles (capital letters to indicate shouting) and emoticons ( ) (Marber 1999: 27). In the same year, another innovative play addressing mediatized culture made an appearance: Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life. Unlike Marber’s play, Crimp’s Attempts does not use the media-generated language style. Instead, Attempts uses language in ways that suggest links to our changing social and cognitive conditions in a media-saturated ecology. For example, the unattributed speech raises the question of how much agency we have over our language and perception, bearing in mind our mediatized ontology and media-driven consciousness. Fast-forward to 2014 – almost two decades after these initial dramaturgical reflections on mediatized life and language – Christopher Brett Bailey’s THWD engages with the contemporary through a striking and critical emphasis on language. The play makes hardly any reference to technology’s impact on our lives through the direct use of media language – such as Twitter-style short text speak with hashtags – something that we see an early version of in Closer. Instead, similar to Attempts, THWD uses language to subtly evoke aspects of our mediatized lives and perception. The script, formed as a galloping torrent of words, loads the audience with bite-size information and snapshots, continually constructing and deconstructing meaning until language is finally pronounced dead. The overall affect is an existential and perceptual state that resonates with anyone living in this fast-paced, information age. Since the late 1990s, playtexts have had this specific preoccupation with the language of mediatized culture – from Marber’s open use of netspeak

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to Crimp’s fragmented and depersonalized and Bailey’s torrential, fastpaced language. These plays suggest a significant shift in the dramaturgy of language. While some of the plays engage with mediatized language in line with the vision and aesthetics of the realist dramatic tradition, others reconsider language in a way that subverts this deep-seated tradition in order to speak to the realities of mediatized culture and consciousness. Both dramatic and no-longer-dramatic dramaturgies of language in these plays offer intriguing reflections on our existence in a media-driven age. However, whether and how differing aesthetico-critical engagements with language in a mediatized culture cultivate a critical distance from our engrained socio-cognitive environment is a question yet to be explored. This chapter wonders: What does the shift in the dramaturgy of language, produced whether deliberately or unconsciously in playtexts, contain? How does it work in relation to dramatic representation and its crisis, particularly in the mediatized age, where the globalized, fast-paced, information-intensive, politically and economically uncertain state of the world is rendering language less reliable and less capable of identifying the realities we live in? How, if at all, do new modes of language use open up critical spaces to engage with mediatized society and consciousness? Before we delve into these questions, it is useful to briefly consider how language has evolved in a mediatized culture and identify some general aspects of mediatized language.

Language in a mediatized culture Language is a layered construct with various aspects. It is important to identify some of these in order to understand its position and meanings within our media-saturated social, political and cognitive ecology. To begin with, language is a primary means of human communication, not simply and only a medium for social interaction and expression of ideas, but also the central medium through which we construct our ideas of the world and understand, interpret and communicate reality. Language, therefore, serves as an ideational mechanism generating representations of the world (Fairclough 1995: 17), reflecting and fashioning reality. Language, therefore, as Hans-Georg Gadamer argues, ‘is not just one of man’s [sic] possessions in the world; rather, on it depends the fact that man [sic] has a world at all’ (2004: 440). As a human-made construct, language is unquestionably in conversation with and a product of the social world; it evolves through convention and social interaction, through repetition from speaker to speaker, and from

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one generation to another. There is no such thing as a non-historical, noncultural or non-social use of language. Besides, language is always already shaped by and often a product and instrument of the dominant power structures. It serves to construct and sustain these structures, as well as being an influential force that shapes power relations and the sociocultural realities these relations may engender. Language carries with it ‘the power of those concrete contexts into which it has entered [and which is] permeated with the intentions of other speakers’ (Bakhtin 1973 cited in Holborow 2015: 124). Hence, language is an ideological technology, if not the ‘most powerful ideological instrument’ (Postman 1992: 123), given that ideology influences the ways in which and the tools through which we give meaning to the world. It defines how we identify, perceive and understand reality, it forms our ideas of the world and our position in it and it reflects and produces power structures and evolves in line with dominant intellectual interests. Often the ideological role and workings of language are veiled, first because ideological structures and narratives are deeply ingrained in our everyday lives, and second because language is perceived as an innate human trait that evades immediate critical attention.1 While the invisibility of language as an ideological instrument helps power structures continue, this does not mean that the buried agenda cannot be unveiled and subverted. Language can be used as a mechanism by the ruling power to impose and maintain their power; yet, it can also be used as a subversive instrument for resistance against the dominant social, ideological and cultural structures. In the context of language and its connection with prevailing power structures, it is important to mention discourse. Like language, discourse represents reality, but while doing this, discourse involves language as well as other symbolic means. While language is more about the set of rules and patterns, discourse goes beyond the rules and level of semantics and grammar to grasp and identify how language makes meaning in different social, political and cultural situations. Discourse, in this respect, can be considered as a system and set of representations that form the ways in which we perceive reality. Discourse, Foucault argues, refers not only to ‘individualizable groups of statements’ (1972 cited in Mills 2003: 53) (e.g. feminist discourse) but also to a mode of language use based on a ‘complex set of practices which try to keep them in circulation and other practices which try to fence them off from others and keep those other statements out of circulation’ (Mills 2003: 54). In relation to the idea of language as an ideological technology, discourse ‘can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces

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power; it reinforces it, but also undermines it and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it’ (Foucault 1978: 100–1). Language today is deeply connected to the new media technologies and cannot be considered outside the phenomenon of mediatization, pervading our contemporary society, culture and consciousness. Nevertheless, this is not to say that the impact of technology on language is a new phenomenon. Technology as social, cultural and ideological machinery has always influenced language. With the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, an increasing number of books were in circulation and newspapers appeared which not only revolutionized society but also generated and spread new varieties of language. The advent of the telephone in the nineteenth century and the arrival of broadcasting media in the early twentieth century, among other technological advancements, engendered new linguistic styles and discourses (Crystal 2001: 26). However, the impact of new technologies on almost all aspects of our personal, social and political lives as well as on language has never been as radical, rapid and widespread as it has been since the late twentieth century. In our contemporary media-saturated society, in which media technologies, language, society and power structures are more deeply interlinked than before, language has become mediatized.2 Language, in other words, has evolved in line with new technologies and the sociocognitive and ideological realities these technologies have generated and/or sustained. Since the 1990s, the internet – with its numerous extensions and platforms such as emailing technology since the mid-1990s, text messaging and social media since the early 2000s, and Twitter since the mid-2000s – has drastically influenced language use. The internet, as David Crystal argues, has triggered a linguistic revolution (Crystal 2001: 5). For example, the concise form of text messaging and Twitter posts requires that we communicate in increasingly succinct language. In 2001, The Guardian newspaper launched a text poetry competition inviting people who ‘had 160 characters inside them waiting to come out in the form of a poem’ (Keegan 2002). The winning poet reflexively wrote: ‘txtin iz messin, / mi headn’me englis, / try2rite essays, / they all come out txtis’ (Hughes 2001). The language styles the new media technologies have introduced, which have been quickly and globally adopted, offer a language beyond dialect (Hjarvard 2004: 94). Stig Hjarvard attributes this linguistic invention to the concept of medialect – ‘linguistic variants that arise out of specific media’ (Hjarvard 2004: 75) and ‘spread to other medialects as well as to traditional written and spoken communication’ (Hjarvard 2004: 95). For instance, text message abbreviations (2day, CU, B4), phonetic spellings (bcoz, luv), emotional noises (hehehe for ‘laugh’) and the creative iconicity (